


No Bangs Without Foreign Office Approval

by reckonedrightly



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Case Fic, Dysfunctional Family, F/F, Genderbending, Historical, Pre and Post Reichenbach, Spies & Secret Agents, WWII, WWII Lesbians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-01
Updated: 2014-10-15
Packaged: 2017-12-16 17:38:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 29
Words: 217,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/864779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reckonedrightly/pseuds/reckonedrightly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s 1942, and while London’s nights are no longer interrupted by air raid sirens, the war still rages and not all of it is fought openly. From its headquarters in Baker Street, the Special Operations Executive plans to set Europe ablaze with its networks of spies and saboteurs in Nazi-occupied territory. Joan Watson knows what it is to keep a secret, but she isn’t expecting to be recruited into the clandestine world of SOE. Nor is she prepared to meet Sherlock Holmes, a former private detective who has by her own admission ruined her own life at least three times over—and who has a murder to solve in Occupied France.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue &  Wanborough

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is a work of historical (fan)fiction, and as such I feel it is my job to research. ...Which is lucky for me, because I love it. The Special Operations Executive existed and really were charged to 'set Europe ablaze' with networks of saboteurs during WWII. What's more, they really were based in Baker Street and really did allow, and in fact encourage, female agents, as well as taking on other people who would otherwise have been rejected for clandestine work in that period. However, all characters featured in this are entirely fictional, although some of them are based off real people/inspired by real anecdotes. Expect more chatter about this in my end notes.
> 
> My startled and absolutely heartfelt thanks to betas and everyone who has given feedback, especially: [lbmisscharlie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/works) for her endless enthusiasm, attention to detail and patience with my last-minute changes, [frytha](http://archiveofourown.org/users/shimi/works) for her insights re: Joan's mental state and rightfully strict attitude towards my ridiculously long sentences and [mobiustrip](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mobiustrip) for being simply marvellous.
> 
> While this fic is for the moment rated 'Mature', the rating will raise to 'Explicit' in later chapters. Speaking of later chapters: 25 is an estimate, but ought to give you the general idea of how long this is expected to be. Updates Mondays!
> 
> Now, on with the WWII lesbians.

  
_That was the marvellous and the terrifying part of SOE in its adolescence: it was pitted and pockmarked with improbable people doing implausible things for imponderable purposes and succeeding by coincidence._  
 **"Between Silk and Cyanide", Leo Marks (Head of Agent Codes, SOE)**

**PROLOGUE:  
** LONDON  
4TH JANUARY 1943 

There had been bombings a few years ago. Joan, like every other Londoner, had gotten accustomed to the strange yellowy grey mornings-after when everybody came stumbling out into the all-clear and tried to work out what was and wasn’t still there. London had become a mouth full of broken teeth; a city with great huge blown-apart gaps in it where Joan had known shops, streets, houses. The bombsites had been, and still were, extraordinary emptinesses; holes in what had previously been absolutely certain.

Now, after France, or perhaps just after Sherlock, Joan had that same feeling all over again. Returning to London seemed like nothing so much as one long, unearthly morning after a very private air raid. She spent long hours cautiously probing the tender gaps inside her, feeling out the places where everything familiar had been blown to rubble.

Which was, of course, distracting, especially when she had other things to worry about. Speaking English, for instance. “Merci,” Joan kept saying to shopkeepers, bus conductors, strangers in the street, or, “Excusez-moi,” to the same, or, “Just—stop,” to herself, occasionally too loud and too much in public, earning herself strange looks.

Otherwise, though, she passed strangely unnoticed, even in her mannish civvies and with her sandy hair cut short and waved back. Practical, hard-faced women in second-hand trousers were all part of the war effort, she supposed, and why should anyone look at her and see more? She was both grateful for and bewildered by the lack of attention. It gave her a curious sense of slippage, as if she were struggling to really be present in the world. When she caught her reflection flitting across dusty shop front glass, she would think: God, who’s that? Or: what’s my cover, again? Who am I meant to be impersonating?

But she was living under her own name in her own country. And she reminded herself that she should be grateful for it.

A flat had been provided for her on Baker Street, so close to the headquarters it might as well have been attached to it. Number 221B comprised a creaking couple of Victorian rooms which were, with a particular cruelty, furnished for two. Mostly, Joan stayed indoors, watching the second armchair stay empty, watching the bath fill, watching the kettle boil. She wished they hadn’t taken her gun from her, though what she would use it for now she didn’t know.

“It’s nice,” she had said when Harding first escorted her to the flat. It was nice. It just didn’t look real, any of it. “What am I meant to do here?”

“Wait.”

“For?”

“The right moment, Watson. You won’t be here for long.”

“No time to waste?”

“No. Certainly not your time.” Harding had given her a tired, wry, sideways look, and brushed his hand over his moustache and mouth. His lower lip had still been a little swollen, a faint dark pink line all that was left of the bloody split Joan had opened with her knuckles just two days before. “Wouldn’t dare try that again.”

Joan had smiled for a second and then looked away, and after a moment she had felt Harding’s hand on her shoulder, patting, gripping, shaking and then dropping away, his footsteps receding and the door closing after him; and then she had been alone, staring at the room and trying to understand why it seemed like a museum. A mock-up of A Flat In 1943.

Not that Joan could reliably remember that it _was_ 1943\. She felt slightly unnerved by how quickly she seemed to be stumbling into the future. 1942 had been a long year, and she had been too busy in France to notice it winding down.

She had been cheated of something. A couple of months. A proper end to the year. An English Christmas. Not that she would have had anyone to share it with, though perhaps if things had been slightly different Sherlock would have been in this very room with her, both of them fresh from France and home in time for something which, well, didn’t matter, because it wasn’t like either of them were religious. It just would have been good to have someone to hold off the night with until they both gave into it; it would have been good to fold and crumple together onto fresh bedsheets, all alcohol breath and inconvenient elbows, with Sherlock’s hair in her mouth. It would have been good to be out of France, to be with Sherlock; it would have been good, very good, if Sherlock had survived to see the Christmas of 1942 anywhere.

But she had killed herself two days before that. 23rd December 1942. Twelve days ago. Six days since Joan had learned that she was dead. Days. And days and days. The word seemed serious but the things themselves fluttered by like moths.

An ugly thought buzzed and flickered in Joan’s mind as she descended the steps in Baker Street Tube station, the underground echoes turning the mutter and clatter of the crowd around her surreal. For six days, Sherlock had been dead, and during those six days Joan had been carrying on as usual, working on getting back to London, thinking that Sherlock would be there waiting for her. There had been no audible crack, no banshee yell, no unexplained bleeding, no feeling of being alone.

On the Metropolitan line to Aldersgate and Barbican, the Tube rattling her in her seat, the lights flickering and her hands clasped in her lap, Joan supposed that soon, she would lose count; that there would, eventually, come a day when she wouldn’t know how many days Sherlock had been dead.

Nobody bothered her as she left the train and navigated her way out of the station. Seeing the bomb-shattered streets again was an eerie shock, almost welcome for how it blew Sherlock from the forefront of Joan’s mind for a moment, though her absence was still palpable, the dull physical ache in Joan’s chest still painful and unnameable as ever. The area around St Paul’s had been hit hard two years ago and still bore the scars; for some reason, Joan had expected it to be cleaner than this by now, less brutalised. In the middle of the maze of ripped-apart buildings the cathedral itself rose up with its round head solemn as a tombstone. At the time, Joan remembered, its survival had been called a miracle, but it didn’t look triumphant; rather, it seemed shell-shocked, baffled by its continued existence.

She was so distracted by the ruins that she almost missed the gate she was looking for. She crossed the road, pushed it open, and all but crept inside.

The park was quiet and lush, almost defiantly green. And totally silent. The low grumblings of the city were muted by the threadbare trees and the buildings, in various states of ruin and repair, which rose around the park’s perimeter.

Or the silence could somehow have been the fault of the woman sitting on one of the benches with her hand on the handle of her umbrella, presenting Joan with a very familiar straight back and a perfect, brassy victory roll. It seemed possible.

Joan dropped onto the bench beside her. “You,” she said, looking straight ahead. “I didn’t think it would be you.”

“Good morning,” said Mycroft Holmes. “Who were you expecting?”

“Someone from Baker Street,” Joan admitted. “For a briefing.”

“You live on Baker Street. Does the Special Operations Executive habitually lure its agents to ancient burial grounds in Aldersgate rather than pop next door?”

“Yes,” Joan said, leaning her head back and staring at the sky, which was January white. “That is exactly the kind of thing SOE does. And usually for good reason. Burial ground?”

“Indeed,” said Mycroft. “This park is built on a centuries-old burial ground. Hence, you’ll note, why the ground is elevated above street level.”

Slowly, Joan tipped her head back down, and looked around. Mycroft was right. “Is that meant to imply,” she said, “that there are so many bodies under our feet right now that...”

“Yes.”

Joan pressed her lips together, bit down hard on the lower. On her knee, her left hand flexed. “Interesting choice.”

“Thank you.”

“You get me to come and meet you twelve days after your sister dies, in an old graveyard. Sensitive. Sensitive idea for a meeting place, really. Is this—do you think this is clever, or something?”

“Death will happen, Joan,” Mycroft said, her voice heavy and calm.“And we can only deal with the aftermath.” Joan just huffed out a scornful laugh, and Mycroft gave a sigh, drumming her fingers on the handle of her umbrella. She was wearing well-made leather gloves, almost definitely pre-war. As Joan watched, she gripped her umbrella tighter and swung it up into the air, jabbing the point in the direction of what was in front of them; the wall of a building rising upwards, with a wooden canopy sticking out of it, towards them, and under it, a wall of plaques or tiles. Joan followed the movement automatically. “The Monument to Heroic Self-Sacrifice,” Mycroft announced, lowering her umbrella.

“Is that what it is?” Joan frowned, trying to read the words on the tiles, though from this distance it was impossible. “Not very dramatic.”

“I imagine that’s the point.” Joan said nothing, and Mycroft cleared her throat to continue, her voice calm and didactic. “Each tile tells the story of an ordinary person who lost their life doing something, ah, heroic.”

“Right,” Joan said. “Sorry, could you just—do me one favour? Don’t talk to me about self-sacrifice.”

Mycroft gave a long-suffering sigh, and Joan’s hands curled up into fists in her lap. “As you wish.”

“Why are we here?”

“Because it’s quiet.”

“No, why are we meeting at all?”

Mycroft made a thoughtful noise and leaned back, her eyes—pale as her sister’s, paler—drifting away from the monument and up to the sky. Joan caught a flash of memory so strong she could almost taste it; Sherlock, standing stranded in the middle of the entrance hall of Wanborough Manor, her chin tipped up, the shadows moving in the wide grey rings of her eyes. Her uniform burned bright blue against the wood of the walls—so much more real than this park, this bench, this deflated, exhausted world.

“There’s going to be a ceremony,” Mycroft said from somewhere distant. “I imagine you don’t want to hear anything so trite as ‘she would have wanted you there’, but you are, nonetheless, invited.”

“By ceremony,” Joan said, “you mean funeral, don’t you.”

“Yes.”

“Good of you. Considering everything.”

“They do say blood is thicker.”

“There’s no body,” Joan pointed out, feeling far away from herself.

“Funerals are for the living, not the dead.” Cover, you mean, Joan thought; cover is for the living, not the dead. And true to form, the next thing Mycroft said was, “She was stationed overseas in Malta, doing signalling work, and died in a car accident while being driven to her billet; the driver and the other passenger were also killed. Considering her dedication to overseas work and the wishes of her unit to be present at her burial, and considering also the current difficulties involved in shipping a body back to England, I have, as next of kin, elected to have her interred in Malta and hold a funeral for her relatives and friends back here in London. In any case, the body is not entirely in a state which grieving loved ones might care to see.”

“Did Baker Street come up with that, or did you?”

“Hardly me; I don’t know where you think I find the time for all the conspiracies you believe I facilitate. You’ll come?”

“No. Thank you.”

“I strongly advise you to at least consider it.”

“You left a message in the flat I’m staying at to organise this meeting.”

“Not personally.”

“Doesn’t matter. You left a message telling me to come to this place, at this time. You left it in the flat, which is not only owned by SOE, but is practically physically attached to SOE headquarters. You’re not meant to know what SOE does, you’re not meant to know where they’re based, you’re not meant to know I’m anything to do with them. But you left a message in the flat, somehow. You didn’t take that risk just to invite me to a bloody funeral which I’m not going to go to. So why are we meeting?”

Mycroft fixed her with a look which made Joan feel as if she were being taken apart and found wanting. In the face of Mycroft’s cool, heavy calm, she felt cluttered and ugly with emotion. She gritted her teeth, and waited for Mycroft to stop staring at her.

“Before my sister left for France,” Mycroft said, “she entrusted to me a letter, to be delivered to you in case anything calamitous should happen.”

Joan breathed out slowly, looking away.

It really was quiet here; beautiful, almost, in that the grass was so green that it hurt Joan’s eyes. Made the rims of them sting. Still, too, but not soft; angular the way English gardens always were; crisp, the chill just nipping through Joan’s oversized jacket. Joan closed her eyes and found she could almost smell France, and the join between Sherlock’s throat and shoulder when they had been in bed together in, where had it been that time; oh, God, in that awful garret where Sherlock had been hiding, after Sherlock had first pretended not to know her and then held onto her so tightly that Joan was sometimes convinced she should still have marks on her upper arms. The room where Sherlock’s mouth had tasted of coffee and the pillow had been damp with sweat all through the night—though how many days ago that had been, Joan didn’t know. Enough to be far away. For her to be forgetting the details already. Brushing them clean in her mind, having to struggle to give them sharp edges.

“Was that her wording?” Joan asked finally. “Did she say ‘anything calamitous’?”

“No. She said it was to be given to you in the event of her death.”

Of course she had.

Joan looked around. Mycroft was holding out a plain white envelope. It was too small and too thin to contain anything substantial, but inside were Sherlock’s last words to her. They could be anything. It might not be over.

“No,” Joan heard herself saying, “no, I, no. Keep it.”

“You do understand why I can’t do that, don’t you?”

Joan heaved in a breath, and muttered, “Your job.” Her voice was thick and angry.

“Yes,” Mycroft said, quite calmly. “My job. It isn’t done for government archivists to hang on to correspondence from traitors guilty of passing information to the Gestapo.”

“Don’t. She wasn’t. You don’t believe that.”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe, Joan,” said Mycroft, getting to her feet. She turned to face Joan, standing over her and fixing her with a thoughtful look, her weight on one hip and the point of her umbrella. The envelope was still in her hand. She was holding it out to her, pinched between thumb and forefinger, like something she didn’t want to touch. For the first time, it registered in Joan’s mind that everything Mycroft was wearing was glossy black. “That is what the evidence points to. And that is how she is thought of.”

“It’s not exactly convenient for me, either. Think of that?”

“Yes,” Mycroft said, her voice turning steely and somehow bored. “I have. And the _inconvenience_ is not what’s stopping you from taking it.”

If she reached up to take the letter Joan knew her hand would tremble. She stared at it instead. “How can you do this?” she asked Mycroft, her voice quiet. “How can you just stand there, planning her funeral, perfectly happy to let people think she was—how?”

Mycroft sighed, and released the letter, dropping it onto the bench where she had been sitting. She sniffed, rubbed her fingertips together as if the envelope had dirtied the leather of her gloves, and dropped her hand to her side. “With a great deal of practicality,” she said. “The funeral is on the sixth. Eleven AM sharp at Abney Park Chapel; there'll be a headstone erected in the cemetery there. There’s a family plot closer to the estate, naturally, but I doubt Sherlock would have approved of that. Ever the Londoner.”

“I don’t want the letter.”

“Burn it, then. Lock it away. Anything, Joan; just don’t leave it lying about,” Mycroft said, turning on her heel to go and walking off, leaving Joan with an unimpeded view of the Monument to Heroic Self-Sacrifice. Her voice drifted back across the park as she walked towards the gate: “There are some terribly untrustworthy sorts around these days.”

“I don’t want it,” Joan said to no one, after Mycroft was gone.

**PART ONE.**

**CHAPTER ONE:  
** WANBOROUGH MANOR, SURREY  
MAY 1942 

Officer training course, they had said. Of course, Joan hadn’t actually believed them, without quite daring to put a name to _why_ —but whatever the suspicions swimming through the dark water in the back of her mind, she hadn’t expected to arrive at a stately home.

Neither had she expected a stately home to seem quite like this.

With its dull, chocolatey wood and the smell of old dust mixing with clean cotton and mashed potatoes, the entrance hall of Wanborough Manor was strangely reminiscent of a boarding school. It was an impression only encouraged by the sheets of typewriter paper stuck to the wood panelling, interrupting the ruddy Elizabethan grandeur of the place. In the doorway, her eyes struggling to adjust to the gloom inside, Joan stopped and stared, leaning on her cane. Chewing on her lower lip. Feeling, but not wanting to feel, the faintest glimmers of excitement humming down under her skin.

The fact was, after all, that this didn’t look like the kind of place she should be, which only made her want to be there more.

In the middle of the hall, a man with his back to her and a major’s insignia glinting on his shoulder was consulting one of the sheets of paper, checking it off against whatever was on the clipboard balanced on his arm. His hair was rusty, his tunic rumpled at the hem, his feet planted almost too wide apart as if to stabilise him as he frowned down at the clipboard. He seemed totally oblivious of the stern, echoing space around him. 

Joan stared at him, knuckles paling as she gripped the head of her cane tighter, and wondered who he was. He had a general air of being crumpled and comfortingly scratchy; an air which shattered when he said, “No point standing in the doorway,” without turning around, his surprising East End accent grating in his throat.

Joan jumped. “Sorry, sir,” she said, stepping inside and straightening up as best she could, coming to attention and forcing herself not to salute: the major's cap was beneath his arm, and as much as she would have felt better for saluting, it wouldn't have been good form. “Corporal Joan Watson, for the officer training course.”

The major turned and gave her a quick up and down look. His eyes dropped to her cane.

Joan tightened her grip and felt the hope she hadn’t been meaning to feel in the first place snap neatly in two.

So that was that, then. She knew as much even before he said anything. It had been a mistake all along and she was going to have to go right back to her typing post in Newcastle. She shouldn’t be so surprised.

At the interview, she had sat straight-backed and attentive as a calm, efficient sort of woman in civilian clothes asked her questions in a tone found nowhere outside the military. In the background, a clock had been clicking through the seconds; they had both had cups of tea in front of them, and Joan vaguely remembered feeling as if they had been playing an unspoken game of restraint, each refusing to take a sip before the other. She had been taciturn, careful. Could she speak French? Yes. Well? Well enough. Yes. She had lived there. A long time ago, though. When? Oh, a long time ago. 1935 to 1938.

“Would the prospect of immediate physical danger dissuade you from carrying out a task?” the woman had finally inquired, suddenly breaking from her line of questioning about France. (Was she well-integrated into French life? Yes, she had had some friends there. What sort of friends? Close friends. Political? Er, no. Artistic.) Would the threat of immediate physical danger stop her in her tracks? No one had ever asked Joan anything like that before, so she had blinked and said too fervently, but quite honestly, “ _God_ , no.” 

The woman across from her had smiled thinly and checked something off on a page in front of her. And they had both let their tea go cold and untasted, two full, chilly teacups still between them on the desk by the time Joan had stood up, straightened her uniform skirt, and said, “Thank you,” and hoped she had done enough, without knowing quite what she was hoping for.

But the interview—and the phone call, when another, different woman with the same polite, blank voice had informed her that she had been successful and would report for a four week training course—had been before the accident.

“Ah,” said the major, and Joan refused to give in to the urge to close her eyes, feeling crushingly stupid.

“I should tell you,” he continued, and Joan for a moment almost liked and almost hated him because he was honest enough to point his pen at her cane, “that there is intensive PT involved in this course. That stick is going to cause you some trouble, Corporal.”

Unsticking her jaw took some effort—it felt like her back teeth were glued together—but she wrestled her mouth open and felt the words _I’m sorry, sir, there’s obviously been a miscommunication_ lying heavy on her tongue. She rolled them awkwardly around her mouth, closing her lips and opening them all over again.

“Corporal?”

Maybe it was the prompt. Maybe he shouldn’t have prompted her. “It’s just a sprain, sir,” she said, a little too tightly. “I’ll be fine in a day or two.”

The major narrowed his eyes at her, and she stared back, too startled by the lie which she had just told to do anything but try and see it through. And then, after a moment, he dropped his arm in what was almost a shrug, and said, “Is it? Good. You’ll excuse a little caution.” 

“Yes,” Joan said numbly, some part of her mind chattering away to the tune of _you idiot you bloody idiot what was that what are you going to do_. “Especially now.”

“What, with the war? Yes, I noticed that, Corporal.” He was grinning to himself, Joan realised, tightening her grip on the head of her cane, suddenly swept up in irritation. He looked up, just a second after Joan had marshalled her features back into tight, expressionless order. “Going to wait in the doorway all day?”

“I’m, no,” said Joan, ramming her cane with more force than necessary into the floorboards as she dragged herself forwards, tension humming in her shoulders. “No, of course not.”

“Good. Well, pleasure to meet you, Corporal.” He stuck his hand out, and Joan grabbed it, gripped hard for a few seconds. “Major Andrew Harding; I’m going to be overseeing your training.” Her stomach dipped even lower. Her hand had to be clammy with sweat. A sprain? Why had she— “Let’s see where you’re sleeping, then. Watson, Watson, Watson...here we go. Room number fourteen, with Holmes, Hooper and Donovan. Any of those names ring a bell? No, don’t see why they would. Right! There’s tea out in the rec room whenever you’ve bagged your bed; there’ll be an address at seventeen hundred hours. Might clear up a few of the questions what you’re dying to ask which I don’t want to answer thirty times over. After that, PT, which you can sit out this time. Got it?”

“Yessir.”

“Room fourteen’s on the second floor. Two flights of steps.” Harding glanced at her cane again. His eyes were a hard kind of green, and his tone was as polite as it was warning. He wasn’t offering any help; for that, Joan thought she felt a thin flicker of gratitude. She gave a tight nod.

“Thank you, sir,” she said, turning on her heel, her heart thrumming hard and fast in her chest. “I’ll consider it intensive PT.”

The sound behind her might have been a stifled chuckle or a muffled cough. Even later, better acquainted with both his belly laugh and his thick, tarry smoker’s hack, she would never be able to tell in retrospect what Harding had thought of her on that first meeting, just like she was never sure what she had thought of him.

Joan let her cane thump harder than necessary against each dark oak step of the two flights of stairs, producing satisfyingly deep echoes. What she had just done—what she had just tried to pull off—was so absurd that it didn’t actually feel real. Particularly because there was absolutely no way out of it.

Room fourteen was marked with another sheet of paper stuck to the door; a number and four surnames, her own right at the end. She shouldered her way in.

The room was bare and bright. At four in the afternoon it still smelt of the early morning. Joan suspected that it had once been a study, but all its native furniture had been removed, replaced with four narrow, stripped down beds with sheets folded precisely at their ends and issues of khaki battle dress folded atop the sheets. There were four bedside tables with two drawers each and one long bench with two mirrors balanced on it. Dust drifted in shafts of weak light from the window.

A brown leather suitcase sat at the foot of one of the beds, along with a pair of well-worn black shoes. Joan frowned at them for a moment, not least because the mysterious Holmes-Hooper-or-Donovan who owned them had bagged the bed nearest to the fireplace, lucky sod. She picked the neighbouring bed and dropped down onto it, putting her suitcase beside her, and, with a sigh, detached her interest from the debris of personality her unknown roommate had left behind.

It didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to be here long. And at least her typing post was warm.

Of course, she would have scrapped it—along with its its nice-enough working hours, its tea breaks, its clattering, eternal noise—to feel her old ambulance plunging forwards unevenly as she slammed her foot down. Or for fixing up a stalled truck at the side of the road at three in the morning, the only person in the world it felt like, freezing right down to her bones, her fingers clumsy with cold. Or the silence of an empty road at night, her headlights just slits of illumination, the only noise the background snarl of the engine and that not a noise at all but more of a vibration in her bones. She would have gone back to any of that in a heartbeat, chilblains and numb fingers and lonely fear be damned. Once you were driving fast enough you forgot.

Obviously it wasn’t an option now, though, so there was really no point thinking about it, just like there was no point thinking about this place, or the interview she had attended. (“Would the prospect of immediate physical danger dissuade—” “ _God_ , no.” The more she thought about it, the more she wondered if she hadn’t actually spoken over the woman interviewing her in her eagerness to protest the idea. Even when she had been driving ambulances, no one had asked her that. The danger had been a cold, unspoken fact, shameful to address. Not the point.)

A sprain. She wished it were a sprain; she wished it were anything at all, a bruise or a break or a mysterious disease. It wasn’t. After just a few days in hospital it had become clear that there was no reason for the limp, no reason for the pain which ebbed and swelled, coming and going, giving her bad days and good days, good days still being painful, and bad days being not just painful but full of a pain which _gripped_. Doctors had tossed around terms like _hysterical trauma_ and then had eventually shrugged their shoulders and said that she was overreacting. Sometimes—often—she thought about begging off sick, forcing her face down into her pillow, and just not moving, just staying there, except of course she couldn’t do that when she had a job to do, even it wasn’t the job she wanted. War, it had turned out, was a lot about getting out of bed when you didn’t want to. Fortunately, Joan had always been good at that.

She pinched the bridge of her nose, took an unsteady breath. She should have just said it. _I can’t do PT_. Short, simple, over in seconds like ripping a bandage off.

And then she would have had to wait, gritting her teeth through Harding’s clumsy sympathy, until transport could be arranged and she could go limping back to Newcastle. Back to her typewriter and the desk which had left red marks on her forearms from leaning on it; the clicking of machines and the smell of paper and ink, tame and dry and bitter.

Of course, it was going to be worse explaining now.

She snapped open her suitcase as if there would be an answer inside it, but of course there was just her kit, and her washbag, and a single letter from Harry tucked carefully back into its envelope. Would the prospect of imminent physical danger dissuade her from carrying out a necessary task? God, no, but the interviewer had asked the wrong question. She should have asked, really, if she would quail at the thought of admitting—

She should have asked if Joan was a worse kind of coward than the sort who ran from danger.

Damn it. Damn it. She would tell him. Right now. She got up, her cane knocking angrily against the floorboards, and reached for the door, flinging it open:

“Ah,” said the woman standing in the doorway, her voice a purring jumble of bitter Cambridge vowels, “oh, _no_ , I wouldn’t bother.”

Joan reached for words. The woman stared down at her. Her eyes were so pale Joan couldn’t quite work out their colour, and her gaze wasn’t exactly patient so much as suggestive of some slightly alien way of experiencing the passage of time. Slowly, furtively, Joan dropped her own gaze to the stranger’s feet, which were shoeless, clad in grey lisle stockings. Ah. 

She raised her eyes, and found Holmes-Hooper-or-Donovan still watching her. “No?” Joan asked finally, her voice tight and pleasant, not sure what they were discussing.

“No,” the stranger said. Her voice thrummed huskily in her throat. “He’s in his office, taking a ’phone call. I imagine he won’t want to be disturbed for quite some time—not even to hear your revelations.”

“What are you talking about?” Joan asked, a little desperately.

“Major Harding, obviously,” the woman sighed. “And your intention to inform him that despite what you said earlier, no, the injury you received in your recent accident isn’t a sprain; it’s much more serious, and you don’t believe it will go away in a few days. But, as I’ve stated, he’s occupied, so I suggest you save yourself the walk. It’s two flights, after all, and he’s only going to dismiss you. I can’t imagine you really want to do it anyway. You’re standing in the doorway, may I...?”

“Yes, of course,” Joan said, stepping automatically away from the door. The woman breezed by. She was in civilian clothing—a dark purple blouse which was really too small on her and a black skirt which, as Joan watched, fanned out and fluttered as she set herself down onto her bed.

“Sorry,” said Joan, “did you overhear—?” She made a gesture over her shoulder, feeling horror and confusion creep slowly but surely inwards.

“No,” the stranger said, “of course not.”

“Right. Good. I’m glad. How do you know—”

The stranger rubbed her hand over her face—spidery fingers passing over thin eyebrows, pointy cheekbones, full lips, a strange, clammy sort of paleness. She was pretty. No, she was very far from pretty. She was probably closer to beautiful, in an unfamiliar and bad-tempered way. “Do you have a pen?” she interrupted. Joan stopped and pressed her lips together.

“I don’t have a pen, no.”

The woman was touching her lower lip with the tips of her fingers and frowning, her eyes fixed with uncanny steadiness on Joan. “That’s interesting,” she murmured.

“Ha,” Joan said, too brightly. “Is it. Sorry, who are you? How do you know— _anything_ about me?”

“By looking,” the woman said, suddenly standing up and pulling out the drawer of her bedside table, frowning at the contents. Joan just stared at her. “It’s interesting because it means that you’re not in the habit of writing to your family—odd for a woman who, until now, has been working up around Newcastle, while her sister remains in London. Of course, perhaps you two just aren’t close. She wrote to you after your accident—a crash, I suppose—but not before or after. Rather remarkable, though, that you didn’t write back.” She pushed suddenly past Joan, whose mouth was hanging open, and threw her suitcase onto her bed to open it. “Maybe she was consoling you after your injury, maybe she was congratulating you on your promotion to Corporal and reassignment to a desk job. You would have found either one distasteful enough—hurtful enough, perhaps—to refuse to respond. Or, of course, you could just not be on speaking terms with her. You don’t like her drinking, after all, or her black market interests, and I imagine your grammar school education, not to mention the time you spent in France, isolated you from your family somewhat. Sherlock Holmes.”

“What?”

“It’s my name. You asked who I was.”

“Right, actually, I meant—”

“Could have sworn I had a pen in here somewhere,” Sherlock remarked, dropping the lid of her suitcase with an irritable flick of her wrist. She seemed to be talking over not just Joan but the universe at large, and she was swanning off in the direction of the door. Still without shoes on. “Supply cupboard on the first floor, then. Lovely to meet you, Joan—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, come off it, you can’t know my _name_ as well as—”

“Your _suitcase_ ,” Sherlock said, poking her head back through the door to deliver the words with a wild flash of teeth and her curls bouncing against her cheek. “You'll want to put in for a room change, of course. When you do stay.” And then she ducked out again.

The door clicked shut. The silence rolled.

Joan stared after her, wetting her lips compulsively, fingers flexing on the handle of her cane. Slowly, she turned to look at her suitcase, where it lay open on her bed. “Oh,” she said, feeling both dim and relieved. Harry’s letter, addressed to Cpl Joan Watson, Fenham Barracks, Newcastle, was sitting quietly atop her neatly-folded clothes. Explaining—really very little, all the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! 
> 
> **"The Monument to Heroic Self-Sacrifice"** \- This is a real thing, and the park Joan and Mycroft meet in is called Postman's Park. I've been there! Highly recommended if your hobbies include finding unusual places of calm and crying in public. Although the closest Tube stop is just called Barbican now, as opposed to Aldersgate and Barbican.
> 
>  **"Wanborough Manor"** \- Also real, also one of the places used for the early stages of training SOE agents. I spent far too long trying to get pictures of the interior, so it's all made up, but: [an exterior](http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/02/37/69/2376961_5e231601.jpg), and [another](http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/02/37/69/2376980_be2715a4.jpg).
> 
>  **"hysterical trauma"** \- As far as I can tell, this is the sort of thing psychosomatic limps etc were explained as at the time, with 'hysteria' remaining, obviously, a fairly gendered concept. And a fairly stigmatised one, too.
> 
> The title, incidentally, comes from an SOE directive, which read...well. What you see before you.


	2. Have You All Met Holmes, Then?

In the end, Joan didn’t tell Harding just then.

She would, of course. But after a few minutes of chewing the inside of her cheek and wondering what had just happened, the room started to feel oppressive. That happened a lot, these days; she would be sitting somewhere perfectly pleasant and suddenly find a kind of restlessness whining in her bones, a need to move buzzing at the base of her spine—and she would find, too, that she was totally incapable of really satisfying it, so all she could do was stand up and walk and try to quiet it until it was manageable.

The rec room was a former sitting room with some of the old furniture left in and other, less stately furniture crammed into it, aggressively out of place. When Joan found it, it was full of men. 

They were all in uniform, all sprawled with cheery carelessness over the mismatched chairs, all drinking from tin mugs and laughing. Chiefly Army but a few RAF. From their insignias, they were all officer class. Subalterns, mostly.

She stopped immediately in the doorway.

“Oh, good,” said a Lieutenant, “we were running out of tea.”

Joan smiled. Brittle, polite. “Beg your pardon?”

“Christ, Anderson,” another man sighed, “she’s here for training too.”

“She—oh. Are you, Corporal?”

Joan straightened up. If she could get through today, she thought, if she could just get through today, she would never again feel adrift; she would be inoculated forever against this feeling of having been cut loose, bobbing helplessly in the tides of other people’s opinions. “That’s right, sir,” she said. The man’s eyes dropped to her stick. “It’s a sprain,” she said shortly. 

The room was much quieter than it had been when she had opened the door, and Joan knew that was her fault. They hadn’t been expecting a woman to invade their territory. She should probably make her excuses, she thought, fidgeting with the handle of her cane.

“Is there enough for one more cup?” she ventured instead, addressing the captain who had corrected Anderson, and the room relaxed slightly, chatter starting to bubble up again—once, she supposed, it had been established that she, like a real human being, drank tea.

“Course there is,” said the Captain, rather indulgently, finding a clean cup and pouring from an industrial-looking metal teapot. The china was absurdly frail, and looked dollish in his hands. Joan wondered if it had come with the house. The manor. “Anderson, off your ar—backside, let the lady take the armchair.”

“It’s fine,” said Joan, dropping quickly onto the sofa; there were two men already on it, who obligingly made space for her and returned, in slightly more cagey tones, to their own conversation. Joan wondered why she was supposed to be afforded the armchair; whether it was the cane or her gender that needed the extra space.

“Suit yourself. Greg Lestrade. Milk? Not the powdered kind, we’re very blessed. Course, there’s no sugar, but that’s no surprise.”

“Watson,” Joan said, knowing from experience that if she gave away her first name too quickly, she would be Joan to them forever when by rights she shouldn’t be. Not that she was going to be here for long. “Milk would be lovely, thanks.”

“I hadn’t heard there were ATS on this course,” Anderson interjected, rather plaintively. “I heard it was commando training.”

“Officer training course, they told me,” Joan said quietly, taking her tea. “So I wouldn’t trust what you hear. Thanks.”

“She’s got the right idea,” Lestrade said, leaning back in his chair and sniffing, drumming his fingers on the arms. The number of insignias in the room had the dazzling effect of making trying to sort out a hierarchy rather similar to trying to spot one zebra in a herd, but Joan thought that as a captain he held one of the highest ranks in the room. From his silvering hair, he was almost certainly the eldest of the men. “What do you think it is, then, Corporal?”

Joan sipped her tea slowly, not looking at him. What did she think? She thought it was something difficult to pin down, something apparently involving France, and something secret. She thought she wasn’t going to play any part in it, not with her leg in this state. And she thought she didn’t particularly want to mouth off about it. Or even think about it. “Couldn’t say, sir,” she said, keeping her voice carefully even and totally blank.

“Oh, more girls,” said the Flying Officer sitting beside Joan, and Joan looked up towards the door as the room fell quiet again. Two uniformed women were frozen on the periphery. One was small and mousy and still wearing her cap despite being inside; the other was dark-skinned with a frown which looked semi-permanent, her brown eyes seeming to watch from a careful distance.

“Welcoming, aren’t they?” Lestrade said, interrupting the startled silence. This time, Joan suspected they had gotten over the idea of women in their space, but had been expecting copies of Joan herself, the proper kind of military female: unfashionable, sturdy-looking white women with hard mouths and inscrutable bodies under their baggy uniforms. (Twenty seven, Joan suddenly wanted to tell them all; she was just twenty seven years old and nobody’s bloody army matron—but it wouldn’t have done any good and she didn’t feel twenty seven anyway). 

Lestrade bore up as if he’d been expecting them. “Tea, ladies? Anderson, you really do have to shift your backside this time.”

“Bloody hell,” said Anderson.

“Language.”

“It’s fine,” Joan said again, giving a tight, apologetic smile to the Flying Officer on her left as they all pressed closer together, making room for the mousy girl, who fortunately didn’t take up much space; she held her knees tight together, her elbows in. The only thing she let stay wide were her eyes, which seemed to reflect everything with a kind of mute, watchful nervousness. Her companion—who kept a careful eye on her—took Anderson’s swiftly-vacated seat with a chilly _thanks_. Joan watched with slight fascination as Anderson tried to glance sideways at her, then quickly looked sheepishly away—and therefore missed the moment when _she_ looked searchingly up at _him_ , and then quickly opted to stare fixedly at the teapot instead. “Er,” Joan said. “Hooper and Donovan, is it?”

It was.

Hooper proved to be Private Molly ‘well, Mary, but Molly, you know, to everyone’ Hooper, a young, clean-pressed new recruit of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry with an anxious smile and her brown hair pinned exactly the regulation two inches above her collar. Joan could have taken a ruler to it and found it perfect. She just wished she had remembered to take off her cap; it didn’t seem right to point it out in front of everyone, however obvious the mistake was. Everything about Molly spoke to an attempt at neatness so fervent and so unnatural to her that it made her slightly exhausting to look at. She was a telegraphist, she explained, and she hadn’t applied for any commission; she had just been called up to the interview and, well, here she was.

Sally Donovan, sipping her tea quietly and giving short, slightly defensive responses to any queries that came her way, couldn’t have been more different. She was a tall black woman with her hair pinned up into magnificent whorls at her temples which must have taken hours to create, and Joan wondered how she could possibly have managed them on a military schedule. And within seconds of meeting her, Joan felt sure that she _had_. She had punctuality built into her—that perfectly calm, certain air of military order which Molly seemed to strive for, accented with a slight wariness. She was an ACW in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, a fact which she mentioned rather cagily, as if it hadn’t already been announced by her dark blue WAAF uniform. She had applied for commission, but—and here she glanced coolly downwards and addressed her tea, as if to suggest that she wasn’t saying, but she was just saying—this wasn’t exactly typical, was it?

When pressed, she wouldn’t continue, just shook her head and implied she didn’t know what she’d meant and that it didn’t matter.

To Joan’s slight surprise, it was Lestrade who brought up the matter of Sherlock. Joan had been staring into the depths of her teacup, trying to work out whether Sherlock had winked at her before darting out of the door or whether it had just been a trick of the light, when Lestrade mentioned the name. The collision of inner and outer worlds was alarming.

“Have you all met Holmes, then?” he asked, producing a dry, “Oh, yeah,” from Sally and a smiling, “Yes,” from Molly and a, “Yes, I have,” from Joan which she personally wanted to believe had no inflection at all.

“I hope she’s alright,” Molly added, and Joan frowned while Sally snorted into her teacup.

“Why wouldn’t she be?” Joan asked.

“She was asleep when I saw her.” Molly’s hands fluttered carefully over her teacup and saucer, settling them down on the low coffee table with nary a rattle. “And it’s not even teatime.”

“Yes,” said Sally, “ _asleep_ ,” but Joan couldn’t decode her tone: and anyway, before she could ask what she meant, her thoughts were interrupted by an upwards earthquake as the whole room got to its feet. Joan stood and craned her neck to see Harding striding through the door and standing at the front of the room, distinctly changed. Gone was the crumpled warmth of earlier; now, he attracted silence and attention just by standing with his hands held loosely behind his back, shoulders squared as he stood in front of the window with the late afternoon light dying behind him.

“Welcome to Wanborough Manor,” he said, once the room was waiting for it. “I hope none of you have gotten too comfortable, considering training and assessment started the moment you walked in, and we’re about to start with some exercise I’d call gentle but _inventive_.”

He let the faint groan—more a feeling than a sound, and more required than genuine—run around the room, and grinned, some of his old warmth returning. This time, though, there was a sharper edge to it. “This part of the course lasts four weeks and involves a number of physical and psychological assessments. You’ll receive basic training in fieldcraft, firearms training and Morse. I’m going to tell you now that some of you won’t be moving on to the next section. That said, some of you will, and the nature of this course means the people who move on might not be the people you expect. Don’t get complacent.

“For the time being, you’re all considered students. You'll notice we don't have separate messes for the officers and other ranks amongst you. Enforce rank amongst yourselves if you like, but while you’re here you listen to the instructors and the staff, regardless of rank. Meaning if one of the girls in the kitchen tells you to clean your plate after your tea, you clean your plate after your tea and you do it with a smile. Socialise all you like during your leisure time, of course. There’s a pub down in the village what you’ll have to find your own way to and from with permission from me, and if you try to come back here at three am it’s your own fault if we decide to make you go for a run at six.”

Tests, Joan thought. Weeding out who would run for the pub and who would take an early night . Who would start crying after two beers and who could hold their alcohol. 

“You might have noticed there are some basic security measures in place. For example; the girls that do the driving round here don’t talk. As I’m sure you were all horribly disappointed to learn. But for one thing, there won’t be much need for you to be getting driven anywhere for the next four weeks; for another, comparatively, this sort of security is nothing. We’re not asking the world of you here when we say that letters, if you must write them, and I suggest you avoid it, will come through me; phone calls are prohibited except in cases of emergency and in those circumstances will be taken in my office; and if you end up being driven anywhere, I expect you all to sacrifice your usual routine of flirting with the drivers. For Victory.

“And that’s all. I expect you all at the paddock behind the house in ten minutes, kitted out for PT.”

Joan thought everyone was going to drop back to their seats, so she did just that, having to bite back a grunt of pain—but the room stayed on its feet, the people around her looking down at her with some surprise. “Are you alright?” Molly asked.

“Yeah,” said Joan. “It’s a sprain, it’s fine. Harding knows. I’ll be on the sidelines for a few days, that’s all.”

The room emptied around her, Molly saying briskly that they’d better go and get ready, hadn’t they, and Sally giving Joan a searching look before striding off. Anderson watched her go. “You know her?” Lestrade asked him, but he just shook his head, looking a little angry and a little embarrassed, and hurried to join the migrating crowd. Joan sat there and, when she was the only one left, wondered if she hated herself.

She had never expected to. But there she was; hating not her starchy collar or her baggy uniform skirt or her scratchy khaki stockings, not even her meaty thighs or her frizzy hair or her leg, but something about herself. And if it wasn’t any physical attribute or pain or obligation, then whatever was causing this sense of impossible contradictory hatred had to be her and her alone. Some fundamental Joan-ness which didn’t work with the world. Which didn’t work, in fact, with Joan herself.

She wondered, too, whether Sherlock Holmes had winked at her, and whether perhaps they had met before. Maybe that was how she had known so much. It didn’t seem likely; Joan would have remembered her, surely. Then again, Paris had been a blur of women’s faces, it sometimes felt like—a hurricane of laughter—only a few details really remained. But even thinking about that here felt illicit. No, more than that. Unseemly, embarrassing, childish.

Eventually, with nothing else to do, feeling like she should show willing, she heaved herself up, put on her cap and navigated her way out of the house and into the late afternoon, where the wind was stirring the choppy, sharp smell of the lawns into the air. Strands of her dirty blonde hair streamed across her face, escaping the confinement of her cap. She found her way out into the fields behind the house, the end of her cane occasionally slipping on the grass as she strode over to where all the students on the course were congregated.

There weren’t many of them. The rec room—once a very sturdy sort of sitting room—had stiffened its upper lip in response to being trampled through by so many military sorts, and by crushing them together had made them seem much more numerous than they really were. As they milled about uncertainly in the open space behind the house, swamped by the countryside, it was easy to see that they couldn’t number more than thirty. Joan felt a strange pang of pride to have even been selected, which quickly started to hurt.

They were all standing outside a fenced paddock which was set up as an obstacle course; planks set above the ground, wooden frames with no explanation yet offered, barriers, tyres. Harding was nowhere to be seen. Joan dug holes in the turf with the end of her stick and surveyed the ranks.

If uniform was the great leveller, PT gear divided and in certain cases conquered. Some who had been brazen and bold in uniform looked younger and embarrassed in their plain shirts and practical trousers. Others lounged with loutish grins on their faces. Anderson was stretching as if for an audience, having given up on trying to bore holes in Sally’s profile with unreturned stares; Lestrade was leaning against the fence and watching him with an interested sort of secondhand embarrassment. 

Sally and Molly, for their part, stood slightly apart from the bulk of the crowd, being awkwardly polite with each other. Molly was shivering in her shirt and culottes, hugging her arms around her against the chill of the wind; Sally was perfectly still, despite the goosebumps on her arms. She had looped a headscarf around her hair to keep it out of the way, and the red of it streamed in the red of the sunset.

“Officer training course,” Joan said dryly, coming to stand beside them.

“It’s a bit ominous, isn’t it?” Molly said, staring up at the obstacle course.

Sherlock was nowhere to be seen; Joan checked the crowd for her twice, and then felt stupid. For one thing, she strongly suspected that if Sherlock was anywhere, it was hard not to notice her.

“What do you think is the best way to get over it?” Molly inquired, rubbing her bare arms.

“Take your time, that’s all; you’re not going to run quicker than the lads, so do it right instead,” said Sally, just as Joan suggested, “Take it at a run, don’t think about it or you’ll get nervous.” There was a brief silence, and then Molly started laughing first, while Joan grinned sheepishly and Sally made a sound somewhere between a tut and a snort, smile glinting at the side of her mouth.

“You’re on,” said Joan, nodding at the crowd behind them, which was beginning to shift into a semblance of order. Harding had arrived, accompanied by a broader, sturdier looking man who seem to have been hewn out of rock, and who announced himself as Sheppard as he brayed for attention. “You’ll be fine,” she added to Molly, who gave her a quick flash of a smile. She wasn’t sure she needed to say anything to Sally, who had looked more curious than threatened by the sight of the course. They moved off together to find their allotted place.

Stretches. Joan stayed tight by the fence and watched them all strain and grimace, the cool of the evening punctuated by Sheppard’s barked commands and faint grunts of effort. Harding looked almost roguish as he, too, leaned against the fence, on the other side of the crowd to Joan. Once, she glanced his way and saw his eyes flash back at her. She quickly snapped her attention away, focusing on the red stripe of Sally’s scarf instead.

Joan’s leg hurt as she watched them move. The ache seemed to spread all through her body, echoing to the beat of Sheppard’s instructions. Jealousy fizzed in her chest, a thin little wire of bitterness puncturing her lungs and heart and wrapping around her windpipe. She imagined—remembered—the deep, satisfying burn of effort.

A flicker of movement caught her eye. She frowned, looking beyond the crowd, and discovered that even then, having met her just once and for less than ten minutes, she could recognise Sherlock Holmes’ walk.

She had changed her clothes, and was striding down from the house in a white shirt and dark blue trousers—strongly reminiscent of PT gear without looking even slightly military on her. What looked like a man’s greatcoat was draped around her shoulders; it rippled and flapped in the wind, slicing up the quiet rustle of the grass behind her with swathes of navy-black. 

She stumbled a little in the grass. Joan started at the sight of her almost slipping, but after a quick shake of her head and an irritable look, Sherlock just stuck her chin further in the air and carried on striding closer.

As she passed Harding, his hand shot out and he grabbed her arm. Joan saw her lip hitch up in a sneer as she turned to face him. Harding raised his eyebrows; Sherlock shucked off the coat and tossed it more at him than to him. He caught it and dropped it on the fence beside him, being careful with it, but she was already striding off. They moved like they knew each other, Joan thought, but it was only the glimmer of an idea; she lost it as she watched Sherlock saunter to the back of the crowd, standing with her hands on her hips, her posture straight and cool. The way her hands tugged at the fabric of her shirt and drew it tight against the twin points of her chest meant that Joan could see a strange, sharp-edged protrusion which baffled her for a moment, before she realised that Sherlock had a packet of cigarettes stowed in her brassiere.

Joan was sure she didn’t laugh aloud, despite her surprise—but Sherlock snapped her head around as if she had heard her make a noise, her pale eyes picking up the evening light. Joan snatched her gaze away and stared, dry-mouthed, at the paddock, the obstacle course looking empty and eerie in the declining evening. She could feel Sherlock’s eyes boring into her at the spot just below her ear, where her short-cut hair—her rumpled, unfashionable bob—didn’t quite cover the sensitive skin of her nape.

 _Not now_ , she thought, though she was pleased to find a core of calm in her. A resignation which could override everything. She would be gone soon, that resignation reminded her, drowning out how something in her chest wailed at the idea—how her heart was beating its fists against her ribcage like the spoilt child Joan sometimes thought it was.

Sheppard was explaining the rules of the obstacle course as Harding stood back against the fence, watching. The grass, apparently, was to be considered acid—here Joan glanced back, just in case, but Sherlock was angling her disdain elsewhere and Joan wasn’t sure why she’d wanted to catch it—and there would be penalties for anyone caught touching it. This could prove problematic, of course, considering that there were stretches of grass between certain obstacles. They were permitted to move any part of the course not actually nailed down; anything, so long as they could get to the other side of the paddock without touching the grass. Or ‘sustaining acid burns’.

“What type of acid?” Sherlock inquired from somewhere near the back.

“Sulphuric, Holmes,” Harding interjected before Sheppard could reply. He sounded grim. “Highly concentrated. And you can go—”

“I’ll happily go first.”

“—last.”

Sherlock tossed her head and snorted at the sky, and Joan smiled, looking back at the obstacle course as the first few recruits—or, well, _students_ , Harding had called them—started to drag themselves up and over it. 

Watching, she felt a pang of envy so sudden and so painful that she gripped tight at the fence, splinters pricking her skin.

“Evening.”

Joan whipped around, holding onto the fence behind her to support herself. Sherlock had wandered away from the crowd and was standing a little away from her, hands behind her back and her curls stirred by the wind. She quirked her eyebrows in greeting, and flashed a smile. “You,” said Joan. 

“Me.”

“Hi.” 

“I already said good evening.”

“You did,” Joan agreed, turning to sag closer to the fence and look out over at the gaggle of students, who were all intent on watching their peers clear the course. Lestrade was just dragging himself up over the first barrier when Sherlock slid in front of Joan, leant her elbow on the fence, and took up most of her field of vision.

“So, have you—”

“I’m not,” Joan interrupted, and had the satisfaction of watching Sherlock’s eyes narrow in slight confusion as she fell silent. “I’m not putting in for a room change. Don’t know why you thought I would, but you were wrong about that.”

Sherlock’s face remained entirely without motion, but there was a tension in her as if she might, very suddenly, begin to smile. She didn’t, but the possibility lent a charge to the air, making it quiver. “Really,” she said. “Anything else I was wrong about?”

“Yeah. I’m not staying,” Joan said, not mentioning the other thing. Sherlock pointedly didn’t smile for a few more seconds, then sniffed, and changed tack, leaning back slightly.

“Did you work out Lestrade?” she inquired. There was a secret smugness in her voice, something glittering in her gaze. Her lashes kept flickering urgently. Joan frowned at her.

“Lestrade?”

“Yes. Did you work him out?”

Joan looked away from Sherlock, settling her front against the fence, and watched Lestrade grimacing as he navigated one of the highbeams, opting for the more practical and less elegant method of sticking close to it, crawling rather than trying to balance upright. It was hard to see what about him needed working out. “He’s,” Joan began, and shrugged, licking her lips, “older than the rest?”

“Yes.”

“And a captain.”

“Yes.”

“And...Harding said that assessment started the minute we walked in—” Joan looked back at Sherlock, who was watching her with a smile threatening at the corners of her mouth. “No,” Joan said, laughing. “No, come off it.”

“You don’t believe me?” Sherlock said with amusement, turning so that they were both facing the paddock. She clasped her hands and leant her forearms on the fence, and Joan watched as the wind prickled up goosebumps and stirred tiny dark hairs. Incongruously, a faint sheen of sweat glimmered on her skin; it was most obvious on her cheeks, where it caught the light.

“It’s a training course, Holmes,” Joan said, moving her gaze to watch Sally start the course, taking her own advice and moving slowly but surely across the obstacles, kicking tires into place and clambering over them with smooth, certain movements. She had been right: most of the men so far had rushed and, according to Sheppard, suffered disfiguring acid burns. “They don’t infiltrate groups of students on training courses with informants.”

“Call me Sherlock.”

“Alright.”

“And I really hope you’re still not under the illusion that this is a course designed to prepare you for being an officer in the ATS.”

“No,” Joan said. “But it’s not going to prepare me for anything, is it? I’m going home. As soon as Harding’s got a free minute to listen to me.”

“You could tell him now,” Sherlock said, looking right at her. “He’s not really doing anything.”

Joan sucked in her breath through her teeth and hung tighter onto the fence. “How did you know?” she said at last.

“About Lestrade?”

“About me. You saw the letter in my suitcase, I got that far, so that’s how you knew my name, and the fact that Harry had written to me recently—but the rest, about the crash and my leg and the typing post—I have no idea.”

“Well,” said Sherlock. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“You’re here,” she said, “or rather you were there, up in the room, putting your things away, which clearly indicated that you hadn’t yet told Harding that your injury would get in the way of your participation in the course. And you’re here meaning you were deemed physically fit at the interviews three weeks ago, so the injury is recent. The letter fits the timeframe, and the fact that it’s the only one clearly suggests it came after your sister heard about your injury. I know it was from your sister because of the remarkably girlish perfume she sprayed on it.”

“You couldn’t smell that from there.”

“Couldn’t I? All your clothes reek of it because you’ve been keeping the letter with your kit. Definitely not yours, probably not an older woman’s either. Young and indiscreet. It’s French, actually; _Soir de Paris_. She got it on the black market, of course, which as a patriotic sort you take exception to, just like you probably don’t like whatever illegal drink it is that makes her hands shake when she’s addressing letters.” Sherlock rolled her shoulders back and stretched, fanning out her fingers. Joan opened her mouth, ready to say actually, before realising that she was rather glad that Sherlock had failed to pick up on one particular truth. Fortunately, Sherlock carried on regardless of Joan’s aborted move to speak. “I know the injury isn’t temporary because you’ve been reassigned to a less strenuous position.”

“You—yeah, how do you know _that_?”

“Your neck.” Sherlock drummed her fingers on the fence, a little percussive break to her melodious, rapid-fire stream of facts. She shot Joan a smile, or at least her mouth twitched in her direction. “Don’t look so baffled. While you were driving you wore battle dress, not service dress, and you wore the jacket buttoned up to the neck without the blouse beneath it because the collars are uncomfortable. It’s a fashion commonly espoused amongst drivers who don’t do the bulk of their work directly under the eye of a commanding officer. There’s a certain independence afforded to women who drive. Now that you’re back in service dress all the time, the collar’s begun to irritate your neck. You’ve marks.”

Joan raised her hand halfway to her throat and then dropped it, refusing to feel around for them. Sherlock smiled. Her eyes were very bright, her fingers moving almost nervously. She looked a little too clammy. “Your promotion,” she continued, “is recent, because the extra stripe on your shoulder is new. Of course, it’s already falling off, because you you rushed the job of sewing it on and you haven’t touched it to repair it since. Why? You’re neat with your appearance. You’re careful with your clothes. Why not fix it? Because it disgusts you, because it’s synonymous with the desk job you hate.”

“I—uh. How did you know I was about to tell Harding?”

Sherlock gave a bark of laughter. “I listened outside the door. You were silent and still for a while, and then you got up suddenly and practically broke the floorboards with the end of your cane thumping towards the door. That says angry but resolute to me. What else was there?”

“Grammar school. And France.” The words tumbled off Joan’s tongue. She was staring hard at Sherlock, right into her eyes.

“Oh, of course. Well, the fact that you went to France at all suggests grammar school to me. You’ve got a fairly working class London accent, but more elevated intonation and phrasing at times.”

“More elevated.”

“It’s hardly upper-class; I thought you’d prefer ‘more elevated’ to ‘middle’.”

“What—”

“So, you’re well-educated. From your sister’s handwriting, she isn’t. Don’t give me that look; ill-educated _J_ s are the most obvious things in the world. You, however—I’d bet money your _J_ is utterly typical of a grammar school student. You were a scholarship girl, and while you were there, you made connections, hence your sojourn in France—probably you had a girlfriend who could afford it or who had—”

“Right,” said Joan, her tone suddenly hard. “Okay. But why do you think I went to France at all?”

“Holmes!” Harding yelled from a little way away. “Enough gossip, get on the course!”

Sherlock somehow managed to roll her eyes with her whole body, dropping away from Joan and taking long strides backwards, limbs swinging to emphasise how tiresome she found having to move. “Why do you think?” she drawled, eyebrows up, before finally turning and sauntering to the the gate of the paddock.

Joan shook her head, trying to do anything _but_ think, because—of course—the suspicion flitting through the darkness at the back of her mind wasn’t new. She had been able to feel it there. She just hadn’t wanted to reach in and grab it, and damn it, she wouldn’t do it now. Not when it was so completely useless to her to know what it was she wouldn’t ever be a part of.

“What is it again?” Sherlock was all but yawning to Sheppard, who barked, “Get to the other side of the field without touching the grass!”

Sherlock murmured, quiet and delicate but perfectly audible even from a distance, “I’m _right_ here, there’s really no reason to shout,” and then, in one fluid movement, hopped up onto the gatepost, balancing in a crouch for a breathless second before slowly standing up. Sheppard was gaping at her. Everyone was gaping at her. Joan included. She shut her mouth quickly, however, because Sherlock was putting one foot in front of the other and walking, quite calmly, towards her. Balanced atop the fence.

“You know,” Joan said, taking her hands away from it so that Sherlock could saunter by, her arms held out slightly for balance, “I think that’s cheating.”

“Only if you’re very honourable.”

And technically, of course, she got to the other side of the paddock—without ever touching the grass—in the shortest time of all the students.

“Holmes,” Sheppard yelled, “what the hell was that? I said cross it!”

“You said get to the other side without touching the grass,” Sherlock called back to him, hands now in the pockets of her trousers, still balanced on top of the fence, her teeth glinting in a wide, wild grin.

Joan craned her neck to look at what Harding was doing, almost holding her breath to see what he’d say—but Harding had his eyes narrowed, and was staring at Sherlock. “You’re a damn cheater, Holmes,” he said finally, and Joan could have sworn she saw a faint smile curve his lips. Impossible to tell from this distance. “But that is what he said.” Sherlock just hopped off the fence and chuckled to herself. Across the paddock, Joan felt a baffled laugh jerk in her throat, too, amazed that that was all Harding was going to say about it—then wondered, with a sudden start, whether Sherlock had completed the exercise correctly after all.

But there was no point wondering. There was never any point wondering.

Dark was falling fast, soft and sticky as sootfall. The students were fast becoming just a drifting mass of white shirts barely visible in the fading light. Sheppard started to chivvy them all along in the direction of dinner. Joan, on the edge of things, watched and considered moving, feeling disconnected.

Harding was striding closer. Joan braced up, nerves suddenly humming and her guts churning with liar’s guilt. This time, at least, she could sweep her arm up into a salute. Harding returned it with an abrupt absent-mindedness. “How’s the leg, Corporal?” he asked.

Her chance. Joan licked her lips and steeled herself against oncoming judgement. She opened her mouth, trying to shape the right words, mouthing helplessly for a second and then saying, because nothing else came: “Not too bad, sir.”

“Mm.” Harding put his hands behind his back, nodded thoughtfully, lips pressed ruefully together. He kissed his teeth, met Joan’s eyes, and said, “Not a sprain, is it, Watson?”

Joan closed her eyes for a second and then glanced up at the sky, throat convulsing as she swallowed. “No, sir,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Nah,” said Harding, rubbing his moustache a little regretfully. “Sorry to have missed out on you, then. Your interview was good.” He glanced off into the dark, looking irritable. “Can’t send you home tonight. We’ll sort you out in the morning.” Joan gripped the head of her cane and fastened her teeth tight together, feeling something painful throb in her chest. There was a creak, and she looked to where it had come from. Above them, beyond them, Sherlock had ignored the steady migration of all the other students and had instead clambered catlike onto one of the highbeams. She was standing on it now with her back to them. Joan almost let out a laugh, but stopped it; it tasted too salty and overwhelmed, and she’d be damned if she cried.

Harding was watching her watch Sherlock. Joan wrenched her gaze away and focused on Harding’s face with all the aggressive calm she could muster, every line in her body tight with tension. Knuckles white. “Could I stay out for a few minutes, sir?” 

“Course,” Harding said. “Back at the house in ten; there’s tea out. Supper, I mean. And we’ve got a groundskeeper somewhere. Try not to look too much like a poacher, eh?” He took a few steps backwards, then turned to stride off towards the manor. And then he stopped, and looked up at Sherlock—but in the end he ignored her, just like she ignored him. The dark took him quickly, the back door widening to a bright rectangle to allow him entry and then narrowing to a mere slit of light when he was gone.

Joan sagged against the fence, closed her eyes, and bit down on her lip hard enough to stop her from snarling every swear word she could think of out into the twilight, getting new splinters in her palm, hurting her eyes from how tightly she had screwed them shut.

“You didn’t answer,” Sherlock said, her voice floating through the twilight. Joan opened her eyes and saw her still standing atop the highbeam, but turned towards her. She was mainly discernible by her white shirt and the glowing end of the cigarette which Joan supposed she had salvaged from her brassiere, though where she had got a light, Joan couldn’t say. Or, perhaps—and here she finally laughed, a little damply—that was the point in having two cups.

“What,” she said, exhausted enough to find anything funny. “What didn’t I answer.”

“What do you think I think about France?”

Joan rubbed a hand over her face, pressing her fingers into the spot below the corner of her eye, where she had bags. “Not a clue, Sherlock.”

“Nonsense.”

Joan dropped her hand, knocked it off the fence. “ _Bugger_.” Swearing felt good, so she tried it again: “Bugger, shit, bloody—” This time, she banged the fence with her palm, which did nothing but make it sting. She breathed in slowly through her nose. “Get down from there.”

“No.”

“You’ll break your neck.”

“I _can_ avoid stepping into thin air, Joan. _France_. Tell me what you think.”

“Just—”

“I’ll get down once you’ve told me.”

“Spies,” Joan snarled. “Bloody spies. You know I went to France because we’ve all been to France, we all speak the language, they think we can all pass for French if we need to. So they’ve got spies going across to France, and really that’s wonderful, fantastic, thank God we’re doing something to help the French because Christ knows sometimes I lie awake and think about how it was and how it must be now, but I—would really, really have preferred not to know, considering I can’t do a _thing_ to help.”

The silence breathed. The highbeam squeaked and groaned. “Well,” said Sherlock. “Not bad.”

“Come down,” said Joan.

“Fine,” Sherlock sighed, and Joan saw her turn, crouch—

Slip.

Sherlock let loose a strangled yell and there was a resounding thud, a _crack_ —of bone, wood, whatever, Joan didn’t know; she was just hurtling through the dark with a sudden blank white fear racing in her veins, flinging herself through the gate, across the trampled grass and dropping to her knees beside Sherlock, hands on her, seeking out body-warmth and trying to make sure she was alright and Sherlock was—laughing. 

Low down rumbles of laughter which broke up the night.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Welcome back.”

“What?” Joan asked, and then, “oh fuck, oh bloody sodding _Christ_ —” because the muscles of her leg had bunched up in a kind of pain so suddenly, wretchedly intense that she ended up rolling onto her back, clutching at her thigh. Not the usual pain. This was wrung-out, gloriously red and wild and it came from exertion, using muscles she had given up on.

“Knew it,” said Sherlock, when they were lying on their backs in the paddock, Joan half-laughing through gritted teeth, pain like a thousand wonderful red-hot stars tearing up her muscles. “ _Knew_ it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **"Tests, Joan thought"** \- Joan is completely correct. Students in SOE training schools were encouraged to be around alcohol so that their instructors could see whether they got drunk or not, how they acted when drunk etc.
> 
>  **"The grass, apparently, was to be considered acid"** \- I, er, got this out of 'Charlotte Gray', and inserted it because of the mental image of Sherlock not-quite-cheating which sprung to mind upon reading the passage. As to reports of students being encouraged to cheat: I haven't got any which are SOE-specific, but they're fairly common in all sorts of stories, anecdotes, rumours and occasional actual fact as far as ~spy training~ goes. And it certainly fits with SOE being very much irregular and unorthodox.
> 
>  **"the jacket buttoned up to the neck without the blouse beneath it"** \- Women who wore battle dress (drivers, mechanics, etc) definitely did do this on occasion, and numerous stories on the [People's War](http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/) BBC site (HIGHLY recommended for anyone researching the period/just interested) mention the marks that wearing starched collars caused. I just slotted the two facts together. (That is, I have no idea if forgoing the blouse was for reasons of comfort, or if it was technically against the rules, but I'm going with 'sounds about right' on both counts).
> 
>  **"a scholarship girl"** \- Dear Christ, I think I actually injured myself trying to work out the feasibility of this. And I might as well chat about it, because school in Britain was and is still intrinsically tied up in class, and I don't know how obvious that is to non-Brits. Joan would probably have been expected to leave education at 14, but obviously won a scholarship to a girls' grammar school. The school would have focused on academic achievement, and would have at that point been obliged to accept a certain number of pupils on scholarship, thus exempting them from fees. A grammar school was then and is now subtly different from a public school in various ways which I do not entirely understand (these days, the most important distinction is that grammar schools are non-fee-paying, but it wasn't so back in the late twenties/early thirties when Joan was in school). However, to put it simply: while grammar schools focus on academic excellence, public schools are posher and have bigger names, and are therefore The Good Schools for a certain set of people. In upper-class families, there'll often be a tradition of sending children to certain public schools, and having a certain school's name behind you can often give prestige. Really, I'm just saying all this because a) I never cease to marvel at how complex and how horrible we've made the class system and b) I wanted to emphasise Joan does not have one of those big names behind her. She's been left in a personal no-man's-land insofar as class goes, but that kind of upper-upper class background is not one she's been very closely in touch with.


	3. The Basics of Falling.

The next day began at six am and the morning dawned with military sharpness.

Sheppard thundered up and down the corridors, crashing right past the door to room fourteen as if he couldn’t see it. Still, he banged on every other door so hard, and brayed his good-morning-get-ups to the men so loudly, that inside the women’s room four pairs of eyelashes started to flicker and faint groans of waking stirred up the dull grey air. Joan added an unintelligible mutter, buried her face in her pillow, and tried to cling on to the vestiges of a dream she was already forgetting. She was semi-conscious a few moments before before the door opened, and a broad, hard-faced woman in FANY officer uniform snapped, “Alright, ladies, up. There’s a run in ten minutes; Sheppard wants you all in battle dress for it.” 

Joan screwed up her eyes, allowed herself one single second of dull horror at the idea of leaving her bed, and then snapped into wakefulness. She sat up, hissed in her breath as she stretched, swung herself out of bed and promptly crashed to the floor.

“Oh my God,” came Molly's gasp. 

“Lord,” said the FANY lieutenant in the doorway.

“ ‘m fine,” Joan croaked from next to the floorboards between her bed and Sherlock’s, shuffling backwards to put her back against her bedframe, clutching her knee to her chest and grimacing.

“What,” said Sherlock belatedly, dragging open her eyelids and squinting at Joan. Her eyes focused suddenly, and she tried to push herself up, supporting herself on her arm, but her elbow collapsed under her. 

“Not a morning person?” Joan inquired through the pain, and Sherlock moaned into her pillow.

“I’ll call the doctor up from the village right away,” said the FANY decisively. Joan shook her head, feeling exhausted as the cramping in her leg started to ebb away, leaving just a dull ache behind.

“He won’t find anything wrong,” she muttered, closing her eyes, trying to think through the pain. It felt different; alright, fine. That was true, that was a fact. But it didn’t mean anything. It still hurt, and she still couldn’t walk on it.

“Nevertheless,” said the FANY, and drew herself up to her full height to stride out of the room—though she stopped in the doorway. “You other three, there’s still a run to be getting on with. Front of the house, ten—well, eight minutes by now.”

“I’m sick,” Sherlock all but slurred, sounding so deeply wretched that for a moment Joan wondered if it could be true.

When the officer had gone and Sally, scrambling to pull on the trousers of her battle dress, snapped, “You’re sick and I’m the Queen,” Sherlock made a sound which might have been either a grunt of assent or annoyance. Joan decided to take it as a suggestion that she was alright after all, and sat back up on her bed, massaging the muscles of her thigh. Molly and Sally vacated the room—Sally telling Molly that she’d be fine, and that by run they meant more of a jog anyway and Molly insisting she wasn’t worried; no, really, honestly.

The pain coiling and bunching tight in Joan’s muscles was unwinding. Slowly. She breathed through it, in through her nose and out through her mouth, and banished every bit of traitorous hope from her mind. No point getting excited about a new kind of pain.

But perhaps there was a point in experimenting. Gradually, clenching her teeth against noises of effort, she started to straighten out her leg, massaging her knee as she did so. It took her a while. She bent her knee and then stretched her leg out again, a little further each time, hissing in her breath as evenly as she could. Her muscles whined and clenched and complained that they didn’t work like that anymore and, bit by bit, she proved them wrong. It was the same kind of agony she’d been in last night, just hammered in by sleep.

It was a moment before she realised she had twisted her lips up into a kind of wild, hard grin, teeth gritted in the middle of it.

She quickly wiped the look off her face and glanced across at Sherlock’s bed. There were two pale eyes watching her sideways.

God, she thought, it was like living with a bloody cat. (She had never had a cat. Persie Phelps, in France, had had a cat.)

“You okay?” she asked Sherlock, who murmured an approximation of, “Yeah,” and managed to succeed in sitting up this time. She looked hectic, her eyes still glassy and her hair entirely wild, spiralling madly around her face. As Joan watched, she shoved her hand through the roots of her hair, gripping tight and screwing up her eyes. Trying to wake herself up. And—from the way she looked dazedly down at her fingers after she had removed them from her hair—checking for grease. Slowly, rubbing at the inner corner of one eye with her fingertip, she glanced in the vague direction of Joan’s leg.

“I’m,” Joan said, uncertainly, “I think it’s different.” Sherlock was already wrinkling her nose and looking away.

“Mm. Not used to exertion. You’ll be fine.” She sounded like there was broken glass in her throat, and Joan felt that slight flicker of concern rise up in her again. She really did look awful. Her face was hollowed out by the bags under her eyes, and it was unnerving to see her move so slowly, like she was running on winding-down clockwork.

Of course, Joan reminded herself, she had known her for a grand total of one day. Perhaps she was always like this in the mornings. And in any case, before she could ask any questions, the FANY returned to usher in the doctor from the village and Sherlock, with a toss of her curls and a windmilling clatter of limbs, finally staggered out of bed. She scooped up an armful of clothing from her suitcase and barged past the doctor, out of the door, with nothing but an tired, singsong murmur of, “She got you out of bed to tick a box, you know,” to mark her passing.

Which Joan decided meant she’d be fine.

“What was that?” said the doctor, glancing over his shoulder before returning his eyes to Joan.

“Absolutely no idea. She does that sort of thing a lot,” said Joan. “I think.”

“Ah, well. Young women, high spirits...”

“And early mornings.”

“Quite. Are we ever entirely civilised at six in the morning? Well, no matter. You must be Miss Watson. My name is Dr Lybull. I hear you’ve been having a little bit of trouble with your leg?”

“Corporal. And, uh,” said Joan, feeling all the traitorous hopes she had stamped to bits earlier regroup and rise up inside her, uncertain but loud. “I think it might be okay, actually.”

And after a few moments of painful prodding and questions which Joan tried to answer almost honestly—yes, she’d been in an accident, yes, she’d been walking with a cane and yes, she’d recently started trying to move unassisted—Lybull agreed.

“You ought to be just fine,” he announced, giving her a pat on the knee which Joan could have done without, though she was too stunned to jerk her leg away.“Stand up?”

Slowly, clenching her teeth against the desire to wince, Joan stood up. “And take a few steps,” Lybull prompted, so Joan did. One. Two. Three.

Feeling nothing but numb shock, she answered his questions about where it hurt robotically, standing stock still in the middle of the room. “Well,” said Lybull, getting to his feet. “Strain, over-exertion...you’ll be right as rain in a few days if you go gently. Congratulations, Corporal.”

“Great. That’s great. Could I—uh. Could I ask you to tell that to the Major?”

“Ticking a box, eh,” Lybull said dryly, and Joan gave an awkward smile. “Ginger chap with a London accent, is he?”

“That’s him.”

“He met me at the door and asked me to give him a full report after I’d given you a look over, as a matter of fact.” He glanced over at the FANY officer, and said, “Lieutenant Turner, could I possibly prevail on you to show me where—?”

“His office is this way, doctor,” said Turner, shepherding him out and leaving Joan alone. She sat on her bed, her leg still aching but no longer gripped by cramps, and wondered what to do now. 

She felt blank, stunned, and of course entirely disbelieving. But until she woke up, or until her leg stopped working again just as suddenly as it had started, she should do something. Joining the run wouldn’t be wise; it would be better, probably, to start small—with something like getting dressed, for instance.

She heaved herself to her feet and started laying out pants, knickers, bra, suspender belt, khaki lisle stockings, skirt, blouse, tie, a whole un-put-together jigsaw of khaki and brown and then finally put her hands flat down on the bed and muttered, “Who cares.”

She put away all but her underwear, taking out the battle dress which had been issued to her. She didn’t fail to notice that despite the sheer white shock which seemed to be blanking out even her ability to feel glad about not having to reach for her cane, her hands were totally steady.

Pulling on her trousers was a painful, difficult, and she was panting by the time she fastened them. After that, buttoning her jacket over her bra and up to her neck seemed effortless, and she finally felt glad: there was no starchy blouse collar to grate against her throat. No telling red mark. 

A thought sparked. Driven by the impulse, she staggered to the bench with the mirrors and crouched down beside it, giving a hiss of effort as she found her balance on the balls of her feet and squinted at herself. Her reflection squinted back with bright blue eyes.

And finally Joan smiled. And then grinned. And then laughed, a little too wildly, so she shut herself up and raised her eyebrows, amused and alarmed by the fact that she was crouching on the floor of an empty room, laughing to herself. Her smile wasn’t so easily beaten down, and it curved irrepressibly on her features.

She had missed seeing herself in battle dress. And Sherlock had been right. There was a flush of red along her neck, tender and rubbed raw. Her fingers crept across it, featherlight, and she licked her lips, thinking about Sherlock’s eyes skimming her surface and separating out her secrets—and she turned her head as the door opened.

“Oh,” said Joan. “Right, that’s where you got the greatcoat.”

Sherlock’s lips quirked. She looked much better. Water was still glistening on her cheeks where she had splashed it into her face, and her shoulder-length curls were properly rolled back. A drop of moisture snaked down the shell of her ear and onto the bright white collar of her shirt, which, like her greatcoat, had to be—“WAAF issue,” Sherlock supplied, amused.

“So I can see.”

“You thought I was a civilian,” Sherlock said, still looking entertained as she sat down on the bench, gripping it on either side of her thighs. Her knuckles whitened, paleness spreading splotchily as the skin stretched tight and hard over the bone. With great concentration, Joan forced her fingers away from the skin of her own neck and told herself that she wasn’t going to tip forward onto her knees.

“I should have been tipped off by the stockings first of all,” she admitted, eyes travelling to Sherlock’s legs where they emerged from her navy serge skirt. Grey lisle. The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force equivalent of her own khaki passion-killers.

“Yes, you really should have,” said Sherlock, and Joan abruptly realised that she should be looking into her eyes, not at the slight, smooth bulge of her right calf, muffled under grey wool. She glanced up, but Sherlock was absently inspecting something apparently invisible on the other side of the room, drumming her fingers against the dark wood of the bench and producing hollow echoes.

“Feeling better then?” Joan ventured, smiling slightly. Sherlock’s fingers stopped, and she turned her head to give her a questioning look. “You said you were sick.”

“ _Did_ I?”

“God,” Joan said, with a laugh, suddenly bracing her hands against the bench and, with a great groan of effort, pushing herself back up onto her feet, stumbling backwards against the foot of Molly’s bed and snatching at it, but staying upright. She grinned. “You’re really not a morning person, are you?”

Sherlock flickered up her eyebrows in rueful assent, and cast her eyes lazily over Joan, neatly spinning the subject away from her own failings by remarking, “Congratulations on your leg.”

“Your handiwork.”

“It was, wasn’t it. Since you’re up, my cigarettes are—oh.” Her voice dropped and got grimmer. “Brace yourself.”

“Wha—”

The door opened, and Turner stood square in the doorway, hands on her khaki serge hips. “Major Harding wants you in his office, Watson. And you, Holmes—battle dress, run, now.”

“But I feel dreadful,” Sherlock insisted, and Joan shook her head, slowly releasing her grip on the foot of Molly’s bed and flexing her fingers slowly. Sherlock’s face was a caricature of innocence, and she had turned on a pressingly posh, snippy tone which implied she was speaking for the benefit of society journalists hidden under the beds. “Did I miss the doctor? Rotten of him. It’s all in my file, you know, I’ve a condition.”

“I’ll bet you have. Watson?”

“I just need to get my shoes on, ma’am,” Joan promised. Her retreating shock left her suddenly aware of a swell of trepidation in her chest, which she struggled to ignore as she dragged herself over to her little slice of the room as quickly as she could.

“I haven’t got all day, Watson.”

“No, ma’am,” Joan murmured. Sherlock was scrutinising Joan in thoughtful silence, her eyes narrowed. Joan could feel her gaze on the side of her cheek like the warmth of the sun. She grimaced and reached for her socks, pulling on her left as quickly as she could as if to compensate for the amount of indelicate struggling she predicted she would have to do to bend her right knee up to her chest.

“I haven’t got _all day_ , Watson.”

Joan’s mouth tightened. 

In a flurry of movement at the corner of her eye, Sherlock shot up from the bench and strode over, dropping to her knees in front of Joan. Who blinked.

“Wha—” But Sherlock was snatching her sock right out of Joan’s hands and stretching the material over _her_ hands, then pulling it neatly over Joan’s toes. Her knuckles skimmed the back of her ankle; her fingers snuck up under the hems of Joan’s trousers and pressed warmth right into her skin. Joan gripped tight at the bedsheets and reminded herself that Turner was right there—more than that, Sherlock was right there, and Sherlock was just being friendly or _something_ , with her mouth in an irritable twist of deep concentration, her fingers just a breath of wool away from the jutting bones of Joan’s ankle.

“Go on,” said Sherlock, getting to her feet. “I gather the Lieutenant hasn’t got all day.”

“Get _outside_ , Holmes, before I put you on a charge,” Turner snapped, and Sherlock gestured to her suitcase to imply that she was going to, really, quite as soon as she was appropriately dressed; and that it was rude to rush a woman dressing; and that in any case she didn’t care. Joan stood up shakily, her whole right foot _humming_ absurdly as if Sherlock’s fingers had imparted some kind of charge, and shoved her feet into her brown leather boots. Yanking the laces into place wasn’t as difficult, especially now Turner had stopped yapping at her.

“Right,” she said, steadying herself with her hand on her own bedknob, fingers skittering nervously over the metal. Sweaty. “Sorry about that. Ready.”

She glanced over her shoulder, and Sherlock—cigarette in her mouth, lighter in hand—flicked her eyes away from the end of her smoke to give a momentary nod. The fire was reflected in her eyes, twin spluttering flames.

Joan looked away and focused on Turner’s square khaki shoulders. She didn’t look away from them for the entire duration of their walk to Harding’s office, and it helped.

* * *

“Miracle recovery?”

The clock behind Joan’s head sounded like it was ticking too fast. Chopping up time and interrupting her thoughts, making her heart hum nervously in chest. She kept staring straight ahead, just to the left of Harding’s face. “Sir.”

Harding slumped back in his chair to survey her over his desk, which was as cluttered and untidy as he was. “You know,” he said, “the thing about ‘sir’, Corporal, is that it’s not actually an answer.”

Joan tightened her fingers behind her back and stood straighter. The ticks of the clock all but rattled in her ears, her heart thudding through them. “In that case: yes, sir. Miracle recovery.”

“Good,” said Harding. “Get out of my sight and start catching up on what you’ve missed.”

Oh.

All Joan could hear now was her breathing. She snapped her eyes to Harding’s, and opened her mouth to say _really?_ , awash in a giddy relief—but of course she couldn’t, so she swallowed her wild urges towards gratitude and gave a single, curt nod, turning and walking stiffly out of the room, with a slight unsteadiness, but no cane to knock against the floorboards.

France. Even as she marched rigidly through the dusty wooden maze of the house, France was expanding and unfolding in her mind, stretched open and as searingly gold as Persie Phelps’ hair, France with its straight-lined cities and cracked-open blue mornings too sharp to breathe in and all of it scored over, split open, by the black and green lines of Fascism. She would have gone anywhere, in truth; she would have gone to Germany itself. But France—

It was somehow freeing to have France in front of her for a change, as opposed to lingering behind her, breathing down her neck.

Well, if she actually made it through this course, that was—and if Sherlock was right about France at all. She reminded herself again that she didn’t know her. 

Though she could know her. There was time to know her.

With that thought not so much in her mind as burning in her chest, it was something of a shock to turn a corner and run into Sherlock herself, and remember that she wasn’t thinking about some abstract concept. She was thinking about a woman. A startlingly tall woman with her WAAF greatcoat on and her collar turned up even though she was inside, leaning back against an unmarked door with her chin tilted upwards and the rolls of her velvety black hair already crumpling into looser curls. She seemed to be staring at something Joan couldn’t see, up in the vicinity of the rafters. Joan stopped.

“Ah,” Sherlock said, reanimating suddenly and clicking back into tune with earthly matters. “You’re staying, then.”

It broke the spell. Joan was mostly thankful. “Yeah,” she said, feeling her leg give another resentful twinge and grunting as she slumped against the wall next to her. “I’m staying.”

“Hurts, does it?”

“Yes. Worse than it’s been before.”

“It’s just—”

“I know. Stretching muscles that aren’t used to being stretched. And I’ve probably done some damage limping all the time.” She rolled her shoulders, and looked sideways at Sherlock, who was looking sideways at her. “So.”

“So,” Sherlock replied, eyebrows up.

“How did you do it?”

“Basics of gymnastics. The first thing you learn is how to fall.”

“No, I mean why is my leg—sorry, you meant to fall?”

“Oh, yes.”

“To get rid of my limp.”

“That and it was quicker than climbing down.”

Joan could feel a baffled grin hovering on her face. Sherlock was gazing nonchalantly at the ceiling again, giving Joan a view of her sharp white jawline. “You threw yourself off a highbeam for someone you’d met a couple of hours ago.”

Sherlock glanced back down. Her eyebrows were arched. She looked challenging, not sceptical. “And you threw off a leg injury for someone _you’d_ met a couple of hours ago.”

“Yeah, well, it was quicker than limping,” Joan said, and saw Sherlock’s face twitch before the other woman looked away. Whatever was happening on her mouth—Joan had the oddest feeling it might have been a smile—she hid it behind her coat collar. Joan grinned, and glanced away too. “So. Have we missed breakfast?”

As it turned out, they had—but after Joan's muttered curse at this news, Sherlock suddenly swerved off in a new direction and led her (with no explanation save a cursory _this way_ ) down to the kitchens, where, it transpired, she knew one of the FANYs who worked there, though she didn't explain quite how. Joan didn't see any particular evidence that they were friends; the FANY in question, a rather pale and clammy Private Wilhelmina ‘Billie’ Wiggins, seemed more nervous than affectionate as she supplied toast and margarine on Sherlock's orders. Still, breakfast was breakfast, and Joan wolfed it down without a plate as they huddled outside the backdoor of the kitchen, by the bins, having evaded the eyes of other, less sympathetic (or less scared) kitchen workers. It was chilly out despite the sunlight, which just made the salty warmth of the margarine on her lips and fingers better.

“I was thinking—”

“I should hope so.”

“I, yes, thank you, smart alec. I was thinking, you didn’t meet Lestrade last night.” Sherlock, who was smoking her breakfast, glanced over at her with a reserved kind of amusement. It was mixed with an artificial disinterest which Joan thought might just cover curiosity.

“Quite right,” Sherlock said. She sounded expectant. Joan shrugged uneasily and swallowed her toast.

“I was actually asking _you_ to explain that,” she said. “I mean, you know him. Don’t you? And Harding.”

“Not well,” Sherlock said, flicking ash carelessly from the end of her cigarette.

“And no one seems to actually care if you break the rules...”

“So?”

“So you’re not—you know. Like Lestrade. Already involved in whatever organisation is putting this circus on. Are you?” But Sherlock had rolled her eyes with a wrenching, expressive movement, tossing her curls with it. If it was a lie, it was much too dramatic.

“ _Please_ ,” she said, screwing up her face as if disgusted. “No.”

“Oh,” said Joan. “Fair enough, then. I’m glad.”

“Are you? Why?”

“Because,” Joan said, “that would be the boring option.”

There was a real pleasure in watching the minimal start Sherlock gave; in how her lips parted and her eyebrows flickered up then down, as if she couldn’t quite work out how to take that remark. Finally, she fixed Joan with a stare, blank and hard, almost but with some flicker of interest deep down inside the grey-blue rings of her eyes.

Joan thought, anyway. And she thought she liked it, being looked at like that. Far too much to actually give in to what had to be, _had_ to be curiosity in Sherlock’s expression. She smiled, raised the corner of toast still in her hand, and asked, “Not having any?” 

Sherlock’s eyelashes fluttered blankly for a few seconds, and then she wrinkled her nose, reanimating and turning away from Joan. “I don't eat.”

“Really.”

“Yes. Have my ration,” Sherlock said decisively, her hand back on the handle to the door to crack it open and peer inside. She stretched her arm out behind her, keeping the smoke away from the door. “Billie?”

“ _You_ have your ration.”

“No,” Sherlock said, rather petulantly, and by the time Billie returned, harried-looking and protesting, to the door in order to press more toast and margarine into Sherlock's hands, Joan found it very difficult to turn down a second helping.

“Right. If you're not for talking, we need to find out what we're meant to be doing,” she pointed out when she had licked her fingers clean. “This is my first day properly on the course. And, er, thanks.”

Sherlock flicked her cigarette disdainfully as if to demonstrate exactly what she thought of that sort of nicety, her nose wrinkling. She didn't respond to the thanks, just said, “More _outdoor activities_.”

“Oh,” Joan said, “great.” The thrumming urge to move was still hot beneath her skin, not even slightly diminished from last night, but her leg still ached. “How do you know?”

Sherlock gave her a blank, slightly pitying look through her smoke, and then abruptly turned to hurl her cigarette end away over the bins. Joan watched it arc and disappear. She had a good arm. “Behind you.”

Joan turned. “Ah.” A slight flush rose to her cheeks; alright, fair enough, that had been dim, but having Sherlock in your field of vision would distract anybody; she was bewildering. You watched her like you watched a stage magician at a fair, trying to figure out the trick.

Still, there were other things to pay attention to. For instance: down a slight slope, in the same paddock they had been occupying last night, now cleared of its ramshackle obstacle course and instead fitted with plain round targets, their fellow students were lined up in battle dress. They were stiff backed and staring at Harding, who was standing in front of them and holding a gun.

“Let's go,” Joan said immediately, and set off so quickly that Sherlock, seemingly knocked off-balance by her enthusiasm, had to put a cigarette back in its packet unlit and jog to catch up.

“Good of you to show up, ladies,” Harding said once they were within earshot, Sherlock's black laceups slipping on the dewy grass. “Nice leisurely breakfast?”

“Lovely, thanks,” said Sherlock, straightening her tie; she was the only one there in service dress.

“No battle dress, Holmes? You were issued with one.”

“I’m a WAAF. We don’t wear khaki.”

“You'll note,” Harding said, “that despite how much Holmes gets on all our nerves, I'm not aiming the gun at her, not even for the perfect piece of comedy that would provide. This isn't just because I'd be tempted to pull the trigger, but because you don't piss about with firearms. Which is basically the only rule I want you lot to remember right now.”

Laughter. Sherlock's eyelashes flickered. The rest of her face was entirely still. A moment too late, jerking back to life with a mechanical stiffness, she sneered, “And it’s not loaded—” but her voice didn’t break through the flurry of chuckling around her.

Joan felt a cool shiver flutter over her skin, and stood up straighter and tighter. The laughter didn’t last long. Harding wasn’t that funny. People just didn’t like Sherlock. Joan glanced up to her, and opened her mouth, thinking of saying _ignore them_ , but then Sherlock's eyes slid towards her, and Joan realised she knew better than to try.

No woman in the military, they had promised—the omnipotent they, official men in suits from the Foreign Office—would ever fire a gun. Well, they weren't firing anything today. Harding made that clear three times, to much eye-rolling from the soldiers in the group who were familiar with firearms and who, when unloaded pistols were being handed out, stood first in line and started aiming them idly at the targets without being instructed to do anything. Sally gave their backs—especially Anderson’s—disdainful looks and weighed her own pistol thoughtfully in her hand. Molly looked down at hers with a wide-eyed sort of gravity, taking no notice of anything but. And Joan, when she picked up her gun, pursed her lips down at it, and said, “Nice.”

“Shot before?” Harding asked. Joan hesitated, and gave him a tight smile.

“Fairs, sir. Pellet guns.” And a pistol which had belonged to Persie’s brother.

“Mm. Hit all the tin cans, win a goldfish?”

“Something like that, sir. Can’t say we ever took home the goldfish, though,” Joan said, and turned away, closing her fingers around the butt and feeling the grit of the grip rough and right against her palm.

Perhaps it was the weight in her hand, making her remember—though the pellet guns had been more like rifles. All that she could think, suddenly, was that they had never taken home the goldfish, but that she had won it, once. The very first time she had finally shot down all ten tin cans she had won one in a jam jar, grinning at it until her dad had stopped her halfway across the bridge over Regent’s Canal and said, “Come on, now, he’ll be happier once he’s free; what d’you think we can do with a fish, anyway?”

She’d thought goldfish could live in jam jars, never having seen them elsewhere, but she hadn’t dared say so, for fear of being laughed at. And she had wanted another—but.

“You shoot,” said Sherlock Holmes, from far too close by.

Joan stiffened, fingers tightening on her gun for a second. “I’m out of practice,” she said, turning to face her and taking a step backwards out of Sherlock’s personal space and into safety at the same time. Her eyes dropped to where Sherlock held her own unloaded pistol by her side—gripping it loosely, practically dangling it off her fingertips. She hadn’t seemed too moved by the guns.

“But you shoot.”

“Fairs.”

“I heard.”

“How did you hear? You were miles away.”

“I heard and I lipread to fill in the gaps. Don’t look at me like that, it’s automatic. I can’t not see how people’s mouths are moving.”

“I’m not looking at you like anything,” Joan said, turning to survey the lines of targets, thinking about rows of tin cans and trying not to focus on how Sherlock was stepping closer again, up to her shoulder. She could feel her warm bulk behind her.

“Why didn’t you ever take home the goldfish?” There was a smirk in Sherlock’s voice. Like she knew everything. Of course, she didn’t. She’d gotten Harry wrong. Where Joan’s family was concerned, she could keep on being wrong for as long as she liked.

Maybe I wasn’t that good, Joan thought; did you consider that? Maybe I was any other ten-year-old with her da egging her on and spoiling her.

But her lips quirked. “My dad refused,” she said quite blandly, bringing her arm up thoughtfully to imagine how best to put a put a bullet right through the centre of the target in front of her. “Didn’t approve of fish without chips.” When Sherlock snuffed out a laugh she thought she could feel the sharp gust of her breath hitting the back of her neck, and Joan finally smiled, dropping her arm and turning back to Sherlock. “Have _you_ ever—”

“Enough nattering, you two. Opposite ends of the paddock,” Harding barked.

“God, it’s like school all over again, isn’t it,” Joan muttered, swivelling to start walking off. 

“ _Is_ it?” Sherlock asked, sounding startled, but by then—though Joan glanced back—she was too far away to reply, and Harding was already talking again, his voice blaring through the countryside.

* * *

Her father’s name had been John, and in a way, Joan was named after him. He had used his own name as a nickname for her. John; Joanie; Johnjo. The Johns Watson. He would clap her shoulder and laugh about that.

He had a son, but not the sort of son he wanted. Harry, with his big mouth, his troublesome chatter, had never been a satisfactory son to him. Too soft, and too prone to speaking his mind—careless, naive, with a shock of sunny hair and broad, handsome features. He was the same now, though it was more brittle—more conscious—less sober. There was a persuasive, insistent innocence to him, as if he didn’t have stacks of illicit nylons on his hands, and whiskey, too, and of course the perfume he sprayed on his letters to Joan as if trying, clumsily, to make things up to her. _Look how well I'm doing; look how much I love you._ He was always spinning stories, and the extraordinary thing was that he believed them himself. And once—Joan would always remember it—he had snapped, telling their father, _you’re a right bastard, you should be ashamed_ , and running out of the house. Just once. He had come back in a few hours, shamefully tearstained. Joan had tried to smuggle him out of the way before anyone could see his reddened eyes, though she was furious with him all the same for being so cruel. For not understanding, somehow, that there were things you couldn’t say.

So their father had looked to Joan, scruffy, scrape-kneed Joan, her mother’s despair, and decided that she was his real heir. His little spare self.

When Joan looked back on it, she thought that, more than a son, he had wanted something to call his own. Proof that John Watson—senior—wouldn’t fade from this world. Or proof that he hadn’t already. Joan had been born in wartime and had never known her father as anything but what the war had made him, but long after he was dead her mother would tell her in a quiet and trembling monotone that he had very been different before the fighting broke out and he was called up. When he came back, her mother said, it was like bits of him were emptied out.

With his shot-off arm and his tombstone teeth, it was easy to see right from the start that he was a man with gaps to his name, but the physical holes weren’t the dangerous ones. It was the other pockmarks, the other wounds in him, that you had to look out for.

And yet Joan had loved him, and he had loved her, the kind of rough and clumsy love which was embarrassed to say anything, embarrassed to do anything, embarrassed to deny itself; a love which was childish and clinging, and tore at her heart and made her ashamed and angry because she knew that he hadn’t been kind, and that she had been and still was afraid of him, but that she had loved him, loved him and loved him still.

“Are you going again?” her mother would ask—her mother with her drawn, colourless face, hands perpetually twisting and untwisting a dish rag so that her fingers always had a dishwater dampness to them. “Isn’t it expensive?”

Da would rumple Joan’s hair, clamp her to the side of his warm and battered overcoat, where the smell of stale smoke and beer and mildewed wool was comforting through familiarity. “We always come out better off than we go in.”

“As long as I don’t have to go,” Harry would say, though he wouldn’t have been asked. “You said it was full of criminals last time they were at it, didn’t you, Mum?” And: “You don’t come out cleaner,” after a moment’s thought. Harry was fifteen and fast becoming a wit. Their mum would tell him to hush, and their dad would ignore him, his mouth thinning out like Joan’s did, now, when she was unhappy.

There would never be a row, but Joan knew that her mum didn’t like them going to the carnivals and the funfairs, and that this was part of why her dad liked to do it.

At the gates of the funfair he would hand her a palmful of sweaty coins and they would drift their separate ways; but when Joan found the shooting gallery, he would always be in the background, watching her. She wouldn’t spend anything on sweets or on other games. It was all for the tin cans.

She would take her time, position herself carefully, frown as if she wasn’t quite sure what she was doing. In the background, her father would point her out and laugh at the dumpy little girl trying her hand at shooting a pellet gun.

One. The sound of a tin can crumpling.

And then someone would slap him on the back and grin and say she showed you, eh.

Two.

Her father would start to moan about coincidence.

Three.

The betting would start.

And on and on and on until nine, by which time a decent crowd would be gunning for her, unseen behind her but loudly audible, yelling out their encouragement as if they thought it would help. It didn’t hinder her either, of course; they sounded far away, underwater. Her father, by then, would be betting more and more that she’d still never hit all ten, and people would be betting against him.

It was never a crime; people made proper money off crimes. They’d scab a handful of pennies and spend them all on sweets and treats and a beer for her dad, who wasn’t talking about money when he claimed they came out better off than they came in. For him, Joan thought, it was about winning. About pulling the wool over people’s eyes rather than being the one led blindly along for once. He’d chivvied her along into the game, slapped her on the shoulder and told her she was a great girl altogether.

For Joan—well.

There was always the temptation, as she stood there pushed up on her tiptoes with the whole world tightened in until it consisted of one ten-year-old girl with a pellet gun and one tin can left standing, to just do it. To shoot the last tin can down and be a, a hero. She would feel her breath sliding down into her chest, soaking through her; she would hear herself breathing, taste the prickling summer sweat on her upper lip, curl her toes in her worn-through shoes.

And she would always miss. By the time the summer of 1925 was over they had perfected the game, flitting through all the carnivals and funfairs of the London summer and only once nearly getting caught, with Joan huddling behind a hook-a-duck stall, struck still with fear as her father shouted his spittle-flecked denials at a copper. What had he done in the war, when John Watson Sr had been getting his arm shot off? Nothing. Flat nothing.

By the end of her tenth summer Joan could miss so closely that it was almost a thing of beauty in itself. The pellet would graze the can, sometimes close enough to leave a mark, sometimes close enough to make it wobble, teeter, but it never fell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading!
> 
>  **"pants, knickers"** \- Yes, both! This will get its proper treatment somewhat later in the story ( _well_ , of course), but knickers here refers to bulky, woolen things, and pants to knicker-liners, which were more like typical...well, knickers, more form-fitting and silky. ATS-issue underwear was not terribly fashionable. Hence why 'passion-killers' (woolly stockings) were known as...what they were known as.
> 
>  **"Wilhelmina 'Billie' Wiggins"** \- It took me ages to realise that in the original Holmes canon, Wiggins and Billy are not the same person. Here, however, I have said 'fuck it', and made them the same person. ...And a WW2 lady.
> 
>  **"fairs"** \- This was based off real-life SOE agent Violette Szabo, reputed the best shot in SOE, who was from a similar background to Joan and who gained her expertise in shooting galleries at fairs with her father. All the stuff about betting and learning to lose, however, is entirely my own invention.
> 
> Incidentally, given they play a reasonable part in this chapter: visual references for uniforms! I just like pictures. Some of these are re-enactment photos for ease of showing colours. (And because WW2 re-enactors are the most lovely people, whose forums have helped me endlessly with uniform research, and made me REALLY WANT a WAAF uniform of my own).
> 
> WAAF service dress: [1](http://www.thehistorybunker.co.uk/acatalog/ladiesraftunic.jpg), [2](http://www.thehistorybunker.co.uk/acatalog/ladiesrafskirt.jpg), [3](http://www.teara.govt.nz/files/p3568pvt.jpg). I can find very few examples of grey lisle stockings but am assured they did exist and were the terrible fate of women of the other ranks in the WAAF. (Officers got silk, same with the ATS).
> 
> ATS service dress: [1](http://www.thegarrison.org.uk/Graphics/Service%20Dress.jpg), [2](http://www.thehistorybunker.co.uk/acatalog/ATSuniformLadiesWW2.jpg), [3](http://www.thornham-norfolk.co.uk/CC%20\(8\).jpg).
> 
> ATS battle dress: [1](http://www.thegarrison.org.uk/Graphics/ATS%20Battle%20Dress.jpg), [2](http://www.thehistorybunker.co.uk/acatalog/ATSBDfulluniform.jpg), [3](http://www.atsremembered.org.uk/joycetrp.jpg).
> 
> And the wonderfully warm-looking [WAAF greatcoat](http://i95.photobucket.com/albums/l146/katiespitfire/IMG_0631.jpg) which, of course, is this Sherlock's version of The Coat.


	4. Fondness and Loneliness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter include: brief discussion of racist attitudes and Nazi ideology, and [possible spoiler]. The potentially spoilery warning is in the end notes, and could possibly be triggering.

“I hate that French know-it-all,” said Sally, throwing the words into the room as she walked in, her damp hair wrapped up in a towel, “and someone’s nicked the bath plug. I had to ball up a stocking and then wash it in the sink—not that _that_ worked. Was it you, Holmes?”

“No, Donovan,” Sherlock sighed, stretched out on her bed on her back, with her hands pressed together under her chin, “I didn’t _nick the bath plug_.”

“Are you French?” Molly piped up, frowning curiously at Sherlock.

“Oh, I didn’t mean _her_ ,” Sally said grimly, rooting through her things for her nightgown; they shared a corridor with a group of men, and so tried to avoid wandering through it in anything less than full uniform.

“Yes, and Norwegian,” Sherlock all but yawned.

Joan, in the middle of this—literally, standing between her bed and Molly’s, trying to unstick the drawer of her bedside table—finally looked up. Sally’s shoulders were drawn up tight. “What is it?” Joan asked the back of her head. “What French know-it-all? Chastain?”

They were in the fourth and final week of the course. Obstacle courses had become second nature; rising at six AM and embarking on a run a terrible reality even for Sherlock; and Joan had found that each day, her leg seemed to improve. Sometimes, she even forgot to be surprised by it. Between PT, psychiatric assessments and agonisingly slow firearms training, they had spent the last few days being interviewed, instructed and generally sneered at by Edgar Chastain, a Frenchman with a thin mouth and small, delicate fingers who could out-smoke even Sherlock. For Joan, speaking French again had been like lurching a rusty old engine into action; she had had to relearn how to manage the thing while on the road, stumbling over her subjunctives at first, and thinking too much of, well—of Persie. But then she’d scrubbed Persie out of her brain and remembered a few irregular endings and, after ten scrambling, awkward minutes, the language had suddenly woken up in her throat and it had been fine.

“Norwegian?” Molly was saying. “You’re lucky.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sally sighed, dropping her nightdress on her bed and starting to unfasten her tie.

“Lucky? Why?” Sherlock asked Molly, screwing up her face and finally consenting to open her eyes.

“The Nazis think the Norwegians are the purest Aryans,” Molly said. “They’d treat you better. You know, if you were ever...” The whole room was looking at her. She flushed, and shrugged. “I’ve just read a lot about it.”

Sally broke the silence with a snort. “Yeah,” she said. “Lucky her.”

“It _is_ Chastain you hate, then,” Sherlock said thoughtfully, watching as Sally unwound her hair from her towel.

“It doesn’t matter. Can I hang this over the end of your bed to dry?”

“You brought it up. And you’ve got your own bed.”

“Yours is nearest the fireplace.”

“But you _were_ talking about Chastain, weren’t you?”

“Yeah. I was.”

“Because of what he thinks of your French.”

Sally sighed, and started rubbing her hair with her towel, long brown fingers tight in the white flannel. “Yes,” she said grimly, “because of what he thinks of my French,” and she left it at that.

Joan looked between them. “Sorry,” she said, sitting back on her own bed. “I don’t get it.”

“Sally’s Martiniquais.”

“My mum’s Martiniquais.”

“Her French is Martiniquais. _Alors_ ,” Sherlock said, unclasping her hands and stretching, toes curling into the starched military-tight sheets. Joan blinked, mouth drying out for a second. _Not now_ , she thought, like she had thought so many times in the past four weeks. “What might we deduce about what Monsieur Chastain, Parisian to his last gasp, thinks of her accent?”

“Well,” Molly said, “I don’t really—that’s a bit stupid.”

“Chastain _is_ , but it’s a valid concern,” Sherlock pointed out. “If she’s going to have to pass for French—”

“You don’t know what we’re going to have to do,” Sally snapped, throwing her towel down on the end of her bed. Joan tensed, preparing—for what must have been the hundredth time in the past four weeks—to pull them apart. Nothing had happened so far, but they each seemed to exist on the very edge of the other’s patience, grating against each other. “And I don’t think my accent is the beginning and end of his problems with me. I don’t exactly look like he thinks a proper Frenchwoman should.” She raised her hand and swept it up to her face, down her body: _look._

“Yeah, well, he looks like the kind of bloke that thinks the French are all white,” Joan said. “Apparently he’s never visited the jazz clubs in Montmartre.”

“I really don’t think they’re still there,” Sally said, looking a little pityingly at her.

“There was a Vichy cabinet member from Martinique,” Molly said, which made everyone pause.

Eventually Sally sighed, and turned away. “Where do you read this stuff?” she demanded, shucking off her tunic and starting to unbutton her blouse. Sherlock had gone quiet in the strangely concentrated way she had, making silence an active force rather than just the absence of sound, her fingertips against her lower lip.

“Well—newspapers, I suppose,” said Molly.

“How’s _your_ French?” Sherlock rumbled suddenly, somehow managing to pitch her voice so that Joan just knew it was meant for her ears only. She wet her lips, and returned to rattling the drawer of her bedside table, turned away from Sherlock.

“Coming back to me.”

“ _Good_ ,” Sherlock said.

Joan smiled politely and finally, with a great yank, managed to not just open the drawer but actually pull it out of the bedside table and drop it onto the floor with a resounding crash.

* * *

“House.” “Brick.”  
“Sister.” “Nun.”  
“Man.” “Soldier.”  
“Brother.” “Letter.”  
“Dog.” “Fleas.”  
“Home.” “Family.”  
“France.” “Freedom.”  
“Mother.” “Ill.”  
“Father.” “Gun.”

Joan stopped, winced at her own answer, and held up a hand. “He taught me to shoot,” she said, rather apologetically, as Dr Welles made a mark on the notes in front of him.

“One word only, Corporal,” he hummed, giving her a serene and distant smile from behind his glasses, the lenses of which were so thick and smeared that his eyes loomed huge but remained somehow indistinct. “Just a few more.”

“Alright.”

“Resistance.” “Fight.”  
“Car.” “Crash.”  
“Bed.” “Sleep.”  
“Love.” “Songs.”  
“Woman.” “Highbeam.”  
“Sex.” “Female.”

Joan’s stomach dropped, and she added: “Like on forms,” which was really what she had meant in the first place. She had never been indiscreet, not even in Paris—relatively speaking, anyway. Welles smiled indulgently, and Joan relaxed, remembering the grim truth: of course, she was the hard and simple army female, entirely unmystical and unerotic, matronly before her time. He didn’t have it in him to suspect more.

“Indeed, indeed,” he said. “Corporal, please don’t be concerned. This is really a formality.” He made another humming noise and smiled at his notes as if they had contributed positively to the conversation. “Yes, you seem more than stable to me.”

Joan chuckled, and then abruptly stopped, realising he had been quite serious. “Good,” she said after a moment, unsure what else she could offer. Her hands were clasped in her lap. She was in battle dress, which she had adopted as her default uniform. No one ever told her to change, not even for meals, and some of the men had opted for a similar strategy. It was simpler, she found, than rushing back up two flights of steps every time they went from sitting down and talking French or politics or psychology or all three to clambering over obstacles and racing through the countryside, and the course flickered unpredictably between those two extremes.

She coughed, slightly pointedly. Welles looked up, smiling as if confused. “You can go,” he said, looking at her with a sort of baffled friendliness.

“Oh. Thank you, doctor.”

“Indeed, indeed. Send in the next chap, would you?”

Joan’s mouth flickered in a slight grin she rather hoped he couldn’t make out, and she gave him a curt nod before she made for the door.

It was a relief to crack it open; the air in Welles’ office was thick with the smell of dusty psychiatry tomes and cough drops. And more pressingly, it didn’t have Sherlock in it. As of late, that had become important. 

Joan shut the door behind her. Sherlock was a little way down the corridor, and moving past the waiting queue with her shoulders squared. Her greatcoat was flapping around her, despite their being indoors; just as Joan had adopted her battle dress as daily wear, Sherlock seemed to live in her coat. Joan grinned at the sight of it, and of her, and called archly down the corridor, “If you’re skipping the line, I’m supposed to send the next chap—”

“I’ve seen him already,” Sherlock said, sweeping onwards. “One psychoanalyst or another, anyway. Come along.”

Joan blinked. “Come along _where_?” she asked, starting forwards to catch up with her. 

“Lestrade’s on a run.”

“And we’re joining in?”

“No. We’re going looking through his room.”

“Of course we are. Why are we doing that, exactly?”

“Oh, you know,” Sherlock said carelessly. “Fun.”

With Sherlock’s strides swallowing up distance and Joan hurrying to keep up with her, they were soon out of the maze of corridors and into the entrance hall, their footsteps ringing out in the battered, wood-panelled silence. “Right,” Joan said, “okay. If I said no?”

“I wouldn’t tell you what Lestrade’s telling Harding about you.”

Joan’s eyes snapped up to Sherlock’s face, and she saw the slight tug of a smile at the side of her mouth. Her own face started, helplessly, to respond, her lips curving slowly upwards. “Come off it. Come _off_ it.”

“He takes notes. Keeps them in his room.”

“And why do you think that?”

“Because he can’t report his findings on us immediately to Harding or he’d be missing all the time. And because he’s methodical like that.” Sherlock ducked her head closer and remarked, very privately, “After all, he’s here, not in France, isn’t he?”

Joan clamped her mouth shut over a terrible laugh which wasn’t really to do with finding anything funny, and looked resolutely away, but kept pace with Sherlock. And kept grinning.

Alright. Poking through Lestrade’s room. It was, she realised, with another wild bubble of laughter threatening to spill out of her mouth, the least of what she would have to do in future, if Sherlock was even slightly close with her suspicions about what they were being trained for.

“Watson!” 

They both stopped midway across the hall, the clacks from their shoes ceasing to puncture the silence. Joan turned and straightened up; Sherlock tipped her head back and hissed in her breath through her teeth, not even trying to hide her exasperation. That done, she half-turned and twisted her head to look over her shoulder, and somehow managed to lounge while upright, eyelashes casting sulky shadows over her cheeks. 

“Sir,” Joan said, by way of a greeting, trying to keep the wariness out of her voice.

“Telephone call for you in my office,” Harding said, his eyebrows up. He cut a neat, angular shape of military green into the shadow of the corridor behind him, having apparently left all his warmth in his office along with whoever was on the other end of the line.

“For—who’s calling me?” 

“Your former sergeant, apparently. Come on.” He jerked his head in the direction of his office and promptly turned on his heel, striding off down the corridor.

Joan gave Sherlock a brief, apologetic look, at which Sherlock only rolled her eyes and gestured for her to go with a sharp, angry movement. So Joan took a few steps away and suddenly, from behind her, Sherlock snapped, “How’s your murdered man, Harding?”

Joan looked around, staring. Sherlock’s eyes were blazing.

“Quiet, Holmes,” Harding said, very softly. “Come on, Watson.”

And Joan would remember that picture, in months to come: Sherlock, standing there marooned in the middle of the entrance hall, half-turned around, staring after her with pale, lingering eyes. She would remember the shock of having met her gaze without meaning to. In Joan’s memory, she would be enormously far away. It would be technically inaccurate. She was only a few feet from her, with the blue of her uniform burning bright against the wood panelling rising up around her.

“Watson.”

“Coming.”

“Here.”

Harding’s office was perfectly neat and rather large, but Joan supposed it was difficult to find small rooms in the manor. The telephone lay off the hook, cord spiraling across the papers ranged on his desk. Oddly, the receiver was painted green. She picked it up.

This was inconvenient, she thought. Stupidly inconvenient. She needed, right now, to run off and find out what Sherlock had meant. But: “Hello?” Joan said to the crackling static. Harding had settled himself behind his desk and pulled a piece of paper from one of the stacks before him. She glanced towards him, but he was intent on his paperwork.

“Hullo, Corporal Watson.”

The voice on the other end was a voice without sharp edges, a voice which coiled its way, crackling, out of the receiver and right into Joan’s ear, and set her teeth on edge. 

Female, like on forms. Arching upper-class vowels. Not any sergeant she had ever met.

“Hullo,” was all Joan said, glancing to Harding, who didn’t react.

The woman on the other end of the line gave a chuckle, intimate in Joan’s ear. “You’re going to ask me who I am; I really advise you not to, considering there’s an officer in the room watching you. Yes or no will suffice for your end of this conversation.”

Joan wet her lips, the receiver suddenly slippery against her palm. The woman on the other end was waiting. She wanted an answer, presumably. “Yes,” said Joan, staring at Harding, who raised an eyebrow at his paperwork and scrawled something rather irritably, ignoring her.

“Excellent,” said the stranger, sounding amused. “As to your question; I’m afraid knowing the answer to that would endanger you much more than it would me.”

“Is that so.”

A staticky sigh. “We agreed on yes or no answers, Corporal.”

“I—” Harding was glancing up, looking curious and slightly amused at her tone, moustache twitching. Joan smiled at him, flexing her left hand. “Yes.”

“Thank you,” said the woman on the other end of the line. She seemed to be able to speak without breathing; there was no way that voice could be anything to do with something as uncouth as lung tissue. “It will serve you perfectly well to know that I am, ah—one might say closely connected with a woman of your acquaintance.”

Sherlock came to mind before Persie—and even though she hadn’t spoken to Persie in five years now, it was a shock. And she was right. “I’ve been informed that you and Sherlock Holmes have struck up quite the friendship.”

Joan licked her lips again. There didn’t seem to be a yes or no answer to that, so she said, “Informed by whom?”

“An informant,” said the woman on the end of the line, rather dryly. “Our agreement. Joan.” Joan didn’t like her name in the stranger’s voice. She pulled it out of its proper shape, made it linger sardonically.

“…Yes.”

“You enjoy her company?”

“Yes.”

“And you know her well?”

Did she? She knew her better than anyone here, but that couldn’t be saying much. Joan imagined what Sherlock’s face would do at the idea that Joan knew her well. Her cupid’s bow would curl right up, probably. Joan felt the strange, familiar pangs of fondness and loneliness, coming together as fondness and loneliness so often did. “No,” she said.

“How interesting. What is your general impression of her? Take a few adjectives, if you like.”

Joan stared at the top of Harding’s head, watching him focus on his paperwork. Her left hand flexed slowly at her side, and then she folded her fingers into a loose fist, willing them to be still. “No.”

“No?”

“No,” she repeated. “Thank you.”

“How very loyal of you.”

“Not really,” Joan said tightly. “Just professional.”

“If I am in possession of this number, Corporal,” the woman on the other end of the phone sighed, “you may rest easy that there is _nothing_ you know which could possibly be news to me.”

“Doesn’t sound like you really need to call me, then.”

The woman gave a cold, cruel sort of _hm_. After a long pause, she said, “I highly doubt you care for my opinion, but I must say—you ought to do very well with Sherlock Holmes.”

Joan pressed her back teeth together and forced herself to straighten the fingers of her left hand, unpeeling the fist she had made. After a moment, she managed, “Right. Nice talking to you, Sergeant.” And she put down the receiver, wiping her right hand on her uniform skirt, trying to soak up sweat or the lingering oiliness of the woman’s voice.

“Everything alright?” Harding asked, looking up.

“Yeah,” said Joan. “I left a few things behind where I was last billeted, that’s all.” She licked her lips in the face of Harding’s polite stare, flexed her fingers. Her heart was thudding. “We, er, never got on, me and that particular sergeant.”

“Could have told you that myself.”

“Probably, sir.” 

“Wait there, Watson,” he said, as she turned to go—without even being dismissed. She was too shaken for this, she thought. She looked back at him, shoulders tight, wanting nothing more than to get out of his office and find Sherlock as fast as she could. “Been meaning to have a chat with you,” Harding said almost lazily, except the slowness of his words suggested a heavy sort of purpose.

Joan wished for an out, but had none. She straightened up. “Yes, sir?”

“Holmes. You’re a friend of hers, aren’t you?”

Joan stared at him, and refused to let her eyes flick from the telephone on his desk to his face. He couldn’t know, after all. Could he? Unless this was some kind of test. How much she would give away. “Sir,” she said, itching to move.

“That,” Harding sighed, leaning back and raising his eyebrows, green eyes glinting, “is _still_ not actually an answer.”

Joan pushed her shoulders back and gritted her teeth. “Sorry, sir,” she said, buzzing with tension.

“My question, Corporal?”

“We’re, yes,” she said. “We’re friends.”

“Good. And would you say she’s…cheerful?”

“Er.”

“She’s a strange one, you’ve got to admit.”

“She’s very intelligent.”

“Yes,” Harding sighed. His tie was skewed and badly-knotted, and as Joan watched him he scratched tiredly behind his ear with a crooked forefinger. “That’s the trouble with some people.”

Joan gripped her hands harder behind her back. Harding watched her expressionlessly for a moment, then wrinkled his nose, crumpling up his moustache. “She didn’t much enjoy what I said at our first firearms lesson, did she?” he asked finally.

Joan glanced away. “No,” she said.

“Yeah,” Harding sighed, sounding tired rather than irritated. “Bloody— _sensitives_.”

Joan considered that. No, there were a lot of words for Sherlock, but she wasn’t sure _sensitive_ was the right one, or not in the way that Harding meant. _Receptive_ , perhaps, would have been better; something about Sherlock was always pulled tight and vibrating to signals no one else picked up. Trying to catch the world on her skin. She wasn’t fragile.

“Tell her I’m sorry,” Harding said, leaning back, “or I’ll never get anything done with her, we’ll be too busy scoring points against each other. And I’ve made better jokes in my life than ones that involve shooting young women, I’ll admit that.”

Joan looked at him blankly. The course here, she wanted to point out, was over. Their first firearms lesson had been weeks ago. She had the strangest sense that whatever Harding was telling her to pass on, it wasn’t an apology for an ill-judged joke. “Good of you, sir,” she said at last, not sure that it was. “But I’m not sure she wants you to apologise.”

“Good thing that was an order and not a request then, wasn’t it, and that you aren’t required to like it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Harding fell silent. Joan gripped her hands tighter together, unable to look away from him as he sat staring at an empty spot on his desk, his eyes distant and thoughtful.

“Any reason you’re still in my office?” he said finally, glancing up at her.

“No, sir,” Joan said, turning on her heel and getting out, every muscle in her body tense and her leg burning with pain.

She searched the whole house, but couldn’t find Sherlock anywhere. She started with the rooms on the first floor where she knew Lestrade billeted, but the corridor was full of blokes in battledress laughing about something that had happened out on the run, and Lestrade was in the middle of them. She swerved sharply away. 

In the end, she had to give up. Sherlock was missing at PT; she was missing at the evening meal, too. Joan ate her dinner without tasting it and gave one-word answers to Molly’s questions, trying to sort out, first of all, which questions to ask herself, so that she could try to rearrange her thoughts into answers afterwards. It didn’t work. She dropped mashed potatoes into her lap.

Though Harding was usually the one to address them after dinner, Sheppard stood up at the head of the room and briefed them instead, explaining what they could expect tomorrow. An early start. More psychoanalysis. A long hike. A lecture on the current political situation in Europe—that got a murmur from the room, some muttering that they were bloody aware of that, some of the more astute wondering _why_. Joan failed to catch most of the briefing, feeling slightly ill and looking at her hands in her lap instead, telling herself there was no reason to feel so uneasy.

Half way through, Sherlock came in, looking pale as death. Joan’s head snapped up and she sought out her eyes, but Sherlock turned her head.

Her teeth were clenched so tightly that her jaw was trembling; Joan could see the muscles in her cheeks spasm. She didn’t look away for the remainder of Sheppard’s briefing—but Sherlock stuck close by the door and didn’t sit down, so when the time came to pile out of the room at the end of the talk, she was gone almost before Joan had gotten to her feet.

“Excuse me. Excuse—thanks. Excuse me.” At least now, Joan thought grimly, she could remember how to fit through small spaces in crowds.

She caught a glimpse of Sherlock, a streak of blue at the top of the first flight of stairs, before she disappeared upwards. Joan sighed and started on up.

“Where has she been all afternoon?” she heard Molly ask, and she jumped, not having realised that Molly was just behind her—and Sally, too, looking weary.

“Asleep,” said Sally, “probably.” Her voice was tinged with something cold and dull which Joan couldn’t understand.

“Search me,” she offered, and continued up the stairs, to room fourteen, where Sherlock was ransacking her quarter of the room—or, more appropriately, packing.

“What,” Joan said numbly, her entire brain yelling _no_. “What are you—”

“Leaving,” Sherlock said shortly, hurling the black skirt Joan had seen her wearing the first time they had met into her open suitcase and shoving her hands through her hair. She was moving like a caged cat, prowling the tiny space between her bed and Joan’s. Breathing through gritted teeth. “What?” she asked, head snapping up in a bird-of-prey movement, lips curled. “What are you all staring at? —Oh, come on, Sally. You of all people should hardly be surprised.”

Sally walked out from behind Joan and sat on the end of her own bed, the farthest from Sherlock’s. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, Holmes.”

“Yes, you do,” Sherlock spat. She had pulled the drawer out of her bedside table and was grabbing things from it—letter-writing paper, hairpins, a switchblade, string—and dropping them into her suitcase by the handful. “I’m _very_ glad you got your paranoia off your chest to Harding—”

“Get kicked out, then, did you?” Sally asked, politeness stretched thin over hard edges.

“No,” Sherlock said, hands tight on the side of her case. Joan saw her breathe, trying to steady herself, eyes slipping out of focus for a second as her mouth twitched. “I’m just leaving.”

“Okay,” Joan said sharply. “Okay, somebody tell me what’s happening here.”

Sherlock turned her face sharply away. Joan saw her fingers spasm on the edge of her case. “Oh yeah,” said Sally. “Yeah, I’ll tell you what’s happening. First time we met—”

“Sally takes such an _interest_ in these things,” Sherlock was saying, her voice quiet and distant, face unseen. Joan’s heart was thundering in her chest, sweat prickling on her skin.

“—you said she was asleep, didn’t you, Molly?”

“I,” Molly said from beside Joan, “yes, I—”

“But Molly was there a bit earlier than I was. Sherlock wasn’t asleep when I saw her.” Sally was leaning across her bed to stare at Sherlock, supporting herself on one arm, her eyes bright and angry. “When I saw her, she had her eyes open.”

“And you can’t very well say it’s to do with her charitable nature, now can you?” Sherlock said in that same clipped, quiet tone of voice. She sounded like she was reciting something previously learnt by heart. For a moment, the tone was bafflingly familiar, but Joan couldn’t think why. “So why her concern?”

“I say her eyes were _open_ ,” Sally said. “I mean—more rolled back in her head, really. Just the white showing.”

“I suppose her absurd paranoia over sleeping pills must, reasonably, stem from some past experience with a friend or family member who relied too heavily on some sort of medication. Or alcohol, of course.” Sherlock was taking a packet of cigarettes from her half-gutted bedroom-table. Joan could see her hand waver.

“Her fingers were twitching. Not shaking, not like they are now. Actually twitching. She was barely breathing. And you can’t take sleeping pills at four in the afternoon.”

“Ah,” Sherlock said brightly, puffing smoke at the ceiling, “so it was alcohol. That concern with the time of day tends to be more associated with drinking than medication, wouldn’t you agree?”

“The thing about Nembutal, though, which is her nightcap of choice, is that I suppose it must give you a hangover.” Sally’s breathing was coming fast, her voice getting louder. At _hangover_ , Sherlock inclined her head delicately as if to say, _you see my point_.“I mean that’s the only explanation for those yellow pills she has for breakfast, and how she always comes out of the bathroom _sweating_.”

“But of course,” Sherlock said, talking over her, something sing-songing in her voice, rippling dangerously below the surface of her calm, “Sally’s past experiences with a family member who drank were already obvious. Like everything about Sally is obvious. Because of her _watch_.”

“So that’s your _genius_ for you.”

“Very masculine, isn’t it? Too big for her, too. It was her father’s, originally, but it came to her after he died.”

“I’m amazed they let her in here, you know. I’m amazed no one’s noticed. So yeah, I told Harding that she was medicating herself. I should have told him the first time, after I had to shake her awake and she nearly clawed my eyes out for my trouble. Because you know what? It’s not safe. I don’t feel bloody safe in this room, with _her_.”

“Obviously the pawnbroker’s marks on the back suggest money troubles, but what’s really interesting is how scratched up it is, in particular around the crown, where one winds it. That’s a screw-down crown, so of course he would have to tug it out each night—it’s actually slightly broken, from all that clumsy, drunken struggling.”

“Do you trust her?”

“And then look at where his thumbnail ran the same awkward course each night—well, it’s all obvious, really, but the reason Sally’s getting so upset over perfectly harmless medicine is all to do with—”

“She’s just a lunatic who can’t cope with herself—”

“—having a father who drank himself to death.”

“—because she’s a freak of nature.”

Sherlock finally rounded on Sally, across all four beds, her eyes blazing cold and her teeth bared. “ _Shut up._ ”

“Alright!” said Joan, and the room froze. She could feel Molly standing perfectly still beside her, and knew her eyes were wide. “Alright. Stop. Both of you, stop.” 

She breathed in slowly. Sherlock hadn’t turned her face, but she was looking at Joan from the corner of her eyes. Grey, Joan thought finally, giddily. Irrelevantly. Her eyes were definitely grey in this light. She licked her lips and said, “Sherlock, with me.”

“I—” Sherlock finally turned. Joan held up a hand.

“Just. Leave the packing. And come with me. Please.”

They breathed, staring at each other. Sherlock didn’t move, so Joan turned on her heel and left the room, as if to prove it could be done. Sure enough, when Joan was halfway down the corridor she heard the door unlatch behind her, and Sherlock’s footsteps. She stopped and turned.

“What do you want?” Sherlock asked.

“To talk to you. Not here. Come on.” She kept her tone steely, and Sherlock kept following her. They navigated old corridors, with their dull, disused sheen, Joan looking for doors not papered with notices regarding what they were now being used for, convinced that one training program couldn’t take up a whole manor. No. No. Her mind kept sticking and shuddering like a stuck record, her heart thumping against her ribcage like a wild thing trying to get out. No. Sherlock wasn’t leaving. “Christ,” was all she muttered aloud. “A bloody stately home and there’s no privacy whatsoever.”

“More common than you’d think.”

Joan shook her head, and led on, their footsteps ringing out in a rhythm and bouncing off the walls, until she found somewhere suitably empty; a corridor where the dust looked undisturbed.

She turned, and the moment when Sherlock realised that she was trapped between the wall and Joan’s stare was satisfying without being pleasant. Their eyes met. Sherlock hitched up one point of her cupid’s bow in a brief sneer which quickly collapsed, leaving her looking distant and angry. Joan refused, she hoped, to show any expression whatsoever.

For a moment, neither of them spoke. “So,” Joan said at last. “Was she right?”

Sherlock licked her lips, her eyes flickering away from Joan’s face.

“Christ,” Joan said. “Are you serious?”

Sherlock’s eyebrows flicked up once and then settled back down again. She still wasn’t looking at her.

“Okay,” said Joan. “Okay, we can sort that out.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said we can sort that out, Sherlock.”

“I’m—”

“You’re not leaving.”

“I’m going to do,” Sherlock said, “whatever I want to do. Is that quite clear?”

Joan stared at her, and wondered if this was how Sherlock saw people all the time. Except it couldn’t be, because Joan couldn’t pinpoint exactly why she suddenly saw Sherlock very, very clearly: why she could see the old house she must have grown up in, the four or five different expensive girls’ schools she’d been dragged into and dragged out of, the time she had spent studying in Paris, the pills and the sleepless nights and the lean, pared-down disillusionment with everything in the world before she had even met it. 

And her brain. Her bloody storm-tossed brain.

She could just see it all, with perfect clarity, a whole corridor of a life stretching out behind Sherlock and maybe in front of her, too. “Don’t you dare ruin this for yourself out of spite,” Joan said. Something in Sherlock’s eyes snapped with anger, and she opened her mouth, but Joan just held up a hand and stepped closer. “Listen to me. Don’t you dare leave. Where would you be going back to?”

Sherlock’s face might have been carved from stone. She looked like a statue: still and alien. “The control tower at RAF Tangmere.”

“You weren’t fixing planes. Wireless stuff?”

“Yes.”

“Happy there, were you?” Joan asked.

Sherlock didn’t answer, and her face didn’t move. Joan didn’t want to do this. She wanted to ask her what she had meant by Harding’s _murdered man_ , and tell her that someone had called looking for information on her. Or just talk to her. About anything but this.

“Two more days,” Joan said. “Just stay for two more days. And then we’ll get moved on to whatever the next part of the course is. Or _you_ will, at least, that’s for sure.”

Sherlock was reanimating in one of her sudden rushes, pushing long white fingers through her own hair and hissing in air through her teeth. “No,” she said, talking over Joan, “no, listen. I don’t want to stay. If I do, I won’t be able to keep taking them.”

Her voice was thick with disgust, anger, clotting at the back of her throat like she was struggling to get words out. Eyes wild and animal, the whites huge around her irises. She looked fraught, as if a current were running through her—she was pushing back her hair and then dropping her hands. Her face was jagged and angry, a smear of dark hair pasted against her cheek with sweat. Her lips were very pale. “What are they?” Joan felt herself asking. 

Sherlock gave a twitch of a grimace and stared stonily upwards again. “It’s all prescription. It’s above-board.”

“What are they?”

“Nembutal. Two at night, to sleep.”

“That’s phenobarbital, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Right. And in the mornings. Yellow pills, that’s what—dextroamphetamine, Dexedrine?”

“Yes.”

“Is that all of it?”

“Dexedrine also tends to be useful later in the day.”

“Right.”

“For that four pm crushing despair,” Sherlock said, with ghoulish humour meant, Joan knew, to scare her. Instead, Joan gave a laugh—genuine, half at Sherlock’s phrasing and half at the idea that she would be scared by talk of despair—which made Sherlock finally look at her without shutters behind her eyes.

 _Receptive_ , Joan thought again. Tiny lights flickered down in the pale depths of Sherlock’s eyes, quivering reflections of the lamps on the walls.

“I don’t think you’re—unsafe,” Joan said. “I don’t think you’re dangerous. But it’s a pretty complicated routine to keep up in France, Sherlock.”

“I’m aware.”

Joan wondered why she couldn’t just say _I know_ like—like anyone else. And why she was still looking at her with her pale eyes lit up and looking strangely ghostly. “Did Harding ask you to leave?”

Sherlock snorted. “Begged me to stay on even while he was castigating me for—everything.”

So that, Joan realised, was what he had been apologising for. He had given Sherlock an ultimatum. “And he said that you couldn’t...”

“He said if I wanted to stay on he’d personally search my kit and get rid of them himself.”

“Christ,” said Joan. “No, bad idea. You need to stop slowly.” If she remembered anything about phenobarbital, at least. Sherlock blinked at her, face cold and hard. “Cut down, then cut them out.”

“I’m _not_ ,” Sherlock began, but her resolve petered out. She licked her lips, and then scowled, face a wordless snarl for a second. Savage, almost. It smoothed out after the barest moment.

They just stood looking at each other, everything grim and anticlimactic. What a miserable way for their four-week-old friendship to end this would be, Joan thought. Here in the dust.

“He asked me to say he was sorry,” she said finally, unable to think of anything else to say. “Harding.”

“Good grief,” said Sherlock, and Joan raised her eyebrows in agreement. They fell silent again. Sherlock was playing her waiting game, her eyes suggesting that she’d just turned herself off to wait for the next moment when she would actually have to engage in the universe. Joan watched her desperately, and then sighed.

“You,” she said at last, “you’re...not really here in the same way the rest of us are, are you?”

Sherlock flickered back to life and raised her eyebrows. “Ask Dr Welles.”

“Not like that,” Joan said, finally laughing again, a little weakly, “alright, a bit like that, but—you know. Look, it doesn’t matter. None of my business. But—you need to do this, Sherlock. Not, not...signal to planes and sit in front of a wireless set all day or whatever you Air Force people do. You—need to do this.”

“Why?” Sherlock asked. Joan’s laugh had faded, and Sherlock’s face had gone blank and stiff again.

“Because you’re a bit of a genius. A complete genius, actually.”

“You know you’re saying all this aloud.”

“Yes. I know. That’s the point.”

“You’re trying to flatter me into staying here.”

“No,” said Joan. “I’m actually not. I’m trying to tell you that someone like you needs to be doing something like this.”

Sherlock stared at her. And said, with a kind of strangled desperation in her voice, “I’ll get bored. I always get _bored_.” The word was ragged at the edges. From the sound of it, it had scraped Sherlock’s throat on the way out.

“You’ll get bored of this? Mad obstacle courses and talking politics—”

“—I’ll get _bored_ of being told what to do—”

“You think that’ll change at RAF Tangmere?” Joan inquired, and Sherlock groaned, grabbing fistfuls of her own hair again, tipping her head back. “You’re in the military, for God’s sake!”

“Yes, tell me all about the alternatives! I could have been a typist knocking out Civil Defence leaflets by the patriotic dozen—a hello girl at the telephone exchange—I could have worked on a farm—ooh, I could have gotten _married_ , wouldn’t that have been just top hole—”

“Sherlock.”

“It’s hardly unreasonable to be dissatisfied! It is not unreasonable,” she said, “to—to want to do something purely because people are trying to—”

“Because it’s the opposite of what people want you to do,” Joan said, and Sherlock dropped her hands, still staring upwards. “You don’t want to go. It’s just that you don’t want to give them the satisfaction of watching you sacrifice something to stay—well, trust me, the way you and Harding are, nothing is going to annoy him more than having to beg for the pleasure of putting up with you, because you’re an annoying little sod but you’re also _brilliant_.” Joan swallowed, scrubbed her hand through her hair, and before she knew it she was saying, “Anyway. I just, I would like you to stay, and I’m not going to beg for the pleasure, so—whatever you like, Sherlock. Your choice.”

For a long moment, Joan didn’t think Sherlock was going to reply at all—not even with a nod or a shake of her head. She held her breath, watching Sherlock’s stiff, carved-marble face make no move at all, watching her pale eyes staring blankly into nothing. Then she saw Sherlock’s throat convulse, a startlingly human movement, and Sherlock said, her voice insistently mechanical and her eyes looking anywhere but Joan, “How slowly.”

For a moment, Joan didn’t know what she meant. “What?”

“Oh, don’t feign ignorance, it does nothing to spare my pride,” Sherlock snapped, suddenly crackling back to life. “You said I’d need to stop slowly.”

“Oh! Oh—right. No, I, genuinely didn’t—never mind.” Giddy with relief and feeling like her knees might go, Joan stepped back and heard herself answering. And stepped back again, and again, then turned and stepped forwards when she felt she could safely look away from Sherlock’s face until finally, by some Herculean effort, they were back at the door to room fourteen, and having an argument about whether it was fair or not for Joan to unpack all of Sherlock’s things from her suitcase.

So Sherlock stayed on. And Joan couldn’t find the time or the words to say _so what about that murdered man_ or _you know that phone call I got_ , because they weren’t left alone for the next two days. The hours passed in an impatient flurry of action and hurried French, final tests and at last, Harding came up to room fourteen himself, looking uneasy as he trespassed on female space to say there was no point telling them all separately because it was the same story for all of them. They were all being moved on to the next stage of training, starting next week. He left quickly, and in the startled silence he left behind, Molly was the first to say, “Oh, brilliant.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Possibly spoilery warnings for drug use, non-IV.**
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> Thank you for reading! Especially thank you for reading this chapter, because it might well be my favourite so far. And I have so many notes for you.
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>  **"someone’s nicked the bath plug"** \- From the stories I came across, bath plug theft was an _epidemic_ amongst the female members of the armed forces during WW2. Most people learned to carry their own, so as never to be without one.
> 
>  **"The Nazis think the Norwegians are the purest Aryans...They’d treat you better. You know, if you were ever..."** \- At Ravensbrück, Aryan detainees didn't have their heads shaved upon entry to the camp, but that's really all that's in it.
> 
>  **"She raised her hand and swept it up to her face, down her body: _look_."** \- Re: Sally's race, I haven't found any record of black SOE agents, but there were certainly black women in the armed forces. (See: [Lillian Bader](http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/teacher/history/served/stories/lilian.htm)). At least one SOE agent was a woman of colour, and was parachuted into France: [Noor Inayat Khan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noor_Inayat_Khan). ...I feel weird about this footnote, because should I have to justify a woman of colour's place in my story? Of course not, and of course women of colour contributed to the war effort in countless ways, that's just common sense. But at the moment I'm writing fiction set in a bygone Britain, and when people do that they tend to go 'AH, THE DAYS WHEN BRITAIN WAS ALL WHITE', which is stupid and racist and spreads an inaccurate image of British history and which I want to therefore smash with a great big 'look at these amazing historical WOC' fact-hammer. And this way I get to mention Noor Inayat Khan, who is one of my heroes (just the most astonishingly gentle person, whose gentleness was never a compromise on her strength and force of character, from everything I've read) so there we go.
> 
>  **"the jazz clubs in Montmartre"** \- In the twenties and thirties, Montmartre was one of the _places to be_ for Parisian alternate/artistic nightlife and attracted a wide variety of people outside the mainstream, as it were, including queer people.
> 
>  **"there was a Vichy cabinet member from Martinique"** \- Henri Lémery. Also, a quick explanation of Occupied France vs Vichy France: Occupied France was the northern part which was explicitly occupied by German soldiers from 1920, and Vichy France was the un-occupied part. The Vichy regime was collaborationist, however, and had pro-Nazi policies. SOE ran operations in both sections. In November 1942, the Germans occupied it after all.
> 
>  **"Nembutal...Dexedrine"** \- 'Oh dear' is the summation of these two. At the time, Nembutal could have been prescribed as a sleeping tablet, and Dexedrine for weight loss, but essentially Sherlock is mixing a barbiturate and an amphetamine for their side effects.
> 
>  **"I don’t want to stay. If I do, I won’t be able to keep taking them."** \- This whole encounter is based off a similar story about SOE agent Denis Rake. He was referred to as a drug addict in his instructors' reports on him due to a reliance on sleeping pills (which would have been barbiturates in this era). He left the preliminary course in the first week but was convinced to come back and stay on without the medication. Interestingly, he was also considered 'a trifle effeminate' and seemingly his homosexuality was an open secret, if that, but SOE recruited him nonetheless. (His cover as a Belgian drag artist allowed him to have a brief affair with a German soldier who never once suspected him).
> 
>  **"Civil Defence leafleats...a hello girl..."** \- Sherlock's referring to a load of different war work and protected occupations. Unmarried women 20 - 30 years old were at this point liable to be conscripted, and could choose between military service and other kinds of ways of helping the war effort, unless they were in a protected occupation (teaching, working at the exchange, etc). Civil Defence leaflets were full of gas mask and blackout instructions and so on, and 'hello girl' was slang for telephone operator.


	5. A Life Spent Losing Patience On Trains.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note/warning: there will be explicit discussion of drug use, addiction and withdrawal in this chapter.

**LONDON  
3RD JUNE 1942**

The tasteful wood panelling of the tea room muffled the outside world, rendering the whole place deliciously cool and quiet. It was just like Mycroft to pick such a charming meeting place, Sherlock thought, and looked around with disgust.

Mycroft always managed to make an impression of such smooth, competent elegance—never veering too close to attractiveness—that most people’s eyes glossed right over her. In her tailored grey skirt-suit, sipping tea and reading the newspaper, her hair sculpted into perfect, understated curls, she looked as immovable and as politely decorative as the modelling of the ceiling. And of course, she was early.

Sherlock clattered into the chair opposite her and hoped she looked a mess, with her WAAF greatcoat hanging open over her civilian blouse and slacks and her hair getting too long. An elderly man a few tables away gave a visible, familiar start. Sherlock was more than used to the expressions of surprise which people gave when they saw her and Mycroft side by side, followed by that uncertain, consolatory assurance that the resemblance was there when one _knew_...

It wasn’t. Mycroft put away her paper as if she’d only just noticed Sherlock and smiled as if she were in slight pain. “How good of you to oblige me,” she said.

“Just pour the tea, Mycroft.”

“And how is the WAAF?”

“Regimented. The Foreign Office?”

“Busy.”

“Mm. Amazing, the workload archivists must have to deal with.”

“And wireless operators,” Mycroft said, perfectly calmly, pushing Sherlock’s cup of tea delicately across the table with her fingertips. Her nails were of a sensible length, free of lacquer, immaculate. “You’ve been in Surrey?” she murmured. It wasn’t really a question.

Sherlock didn’t go still, or question how Mycroft knew. There was no point, and she had never expected anything but complete omniscience from her sister. It wasn’t really even anything to do with the fact that Sherrinford House (always, in Sherlock’s mind, just The House) was situated in Surrey, not far from Wanborough Manor. Their ancestral home might have been in a totally different country, and Mycroft would still have known all the details about where Sherlock was staying. In the short, unpleasant letter Sherlock had scrawled to her from Wanborough, she had quite naturally lied through her teeth about where she was—something about Yorkshire, training for overseas work in Malta—without for a moment expecting Mycroft to believe her. 

Nonetheless, Mycroft might have the decency to at least look slightly chipped by it. She looked perfectly calm, instead, as if mentioning it were almost beneath her. Sherlock sipped her tea. She would have preferred to bite right through the rim of the cup. 

“Yes,” she said, in a cold murmur.

“Well then,” Mycroft said, tilting her wrist delicately to inspect her watch, which she didn’t need to wear.

Mycroft hated the constant ticking of watches, not to mention their slow wind down towards inaccuracy, Sherlock knew. Sherlock also knew, however, that what she detested even more, was any demonstration of the fact that she could name the time down to a second without the help of any sort of timepiece. There was punctuality built into her very bones, and her mind ticked more steadily than the clock at Greenwich Observatory. As a child, Sherlock had kept time by her—because any watch fastened on her wrist in those days would inevitably be drowned or smashed or dissected within a week, and her own internal time-keeping was never quite so accurate as Mycroft’s. There was usually no need to ask; Sherlock would only have to poke her head into the room Mycroft was sitting in, and Mycroft would immediately reel off the time without looking around.

And then they had grown out of childish things like interacting without arguing. And Mycroft had grown into a charade of normality. Hence the watch. Hence the movement. 

Sherlock’s mouth was dry with disgust.

“I suppose you’re taking the noon train from Kings Cross to Inverness, in that case,” Mycroft said smoothly, lifting up her teacup.

“Yes,” Sherlock said, her voice tight. “I am.”

They had been told as much on Friday, the last day of May, and given a long weekend’s leave, with orders to arrive at Swordland Lodge in Inverness-shire on the Tuesday. Today it was Monday; a long, thick Monday which seemed to drag slower and slower and slower.

But later today, she would see Joan Watson. The thought blossomed in Sherlock’s brain and she stuffed it hastily back into its mental box. Still, the idea gave off a kind of warmth somewhere in the back of her mind, and she cherished it with a slightly confused smugness; she didn’t understand it, but Mycroft didn’t even know about it.

“I gather you’ve made a friend,” said Mycroft, and Sherlock put down her teacup very abruptly.

“Have I? I hadn’t noticed,” she said, her voice brittle as the thin china ranged between them. “I’ve got a murder on. It’s rather distracting.”

Mycroft’s eyes narrowed, the perfect nail of her index finger clicking just once against her teacup, and Sherlock felt a rush of victory, because—just maybe—Mycroft hadn’t known that part. She curled her fingers around the warm swell of her cup and smiled coldly into the searchlight of her sister’s stare.

“I presume,” Mycroft said at length, “that it is a murder with potential political significance.”

Sherlock fixed the wall behind Mycroft with a cool stare and took a draught of tea, gulping it down too hot.

 _I presume_... As ever, Mycroft had neatly put her thumb on it, and pinned down the crux of the matter, in the most infuriating way possibly. _Presumption_ was the problem, really. That and the chemical absence which the pills had left her with. One at night. Different one in the morning. She was doing well. She would pass out on the train, of course, suddenly staggering under the weight of her own mental processes; but by then Mycroft wouldn’t be there, so it would be perfectly alright. She was doing well.

Sherlock sniffed, shrugged, and started adding more sweetener to her tea. She didn’t yet know exactly what sort of murder she was investigating. She didn’t have the facts. But she said, “You would presume correctly,” anyway, because not giving in to one's sister was a matter of pride, and self-worth, and at this point tradition which asserted itself no matter what; and she took a delicate sip of her too-sweet tea.

* * *

At the age of eight, Sherlock Holmes had trained herself to stay under the water of her bath for almost four minutes. Her reasons had been as follows: in the case of her ever having the opportunity to study the flora and fauna of the Great Barrier Reef, such skills would surely come in useful; similarly, should anyone try to drown her, she would be better prepared than most to survive; and if she should ever make up her mind to drown herself, she would have a definite timeframe.

She had liked it down there, though, sunk down in hot water, the whole world muted and far away, her eyes tightly closed and her lungs straining against her own determination. Her hair had unravelled like seaweed, floating around and above her head and as she approached the four minute mark, she had felt herself falling. And then gasping and splashing upwards, reeling in the cold air—and once, Mycroft dragging her up, her face horribly pale.

In those days Mycroft had been monumental, in the grip of a glorious sort of self-control: fifteen years old and the pinnacle of human achievement. Sherlock had refused to see her afraid, and had snarled and spat and struggled and locked herself in her room instead, feeling betrayed by her sister’s fear. Whatever Mycroft had said, whatever Mycroft had been frightened of, Sherlock had never been out of control. Sliding under the bathwater had just been to prove it to herself.

A smoking habit stretching from the age of eleven to the present day had eroded her four-minute record, but it was all very well; these days, baths weren’t drawn full enough for someone to sink under anyway, and in any case, Sherlock had found other ways of exerting control in a life which mainly seemed to consist of being told to go to various places and being politely asked to leave others.

For example: at the age of twenty three, watching the war spread across Europe like a Biblical plague except anything but so charmingly distant, and having ruined her life at least three times over, she had joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

For all that she had sneered at Joan Watson about other options for war work, this had been before women were conscripted, though Sherlock had been aware of the danger. Mycroft had been making noises about relatives in Switzerland and friends in Ireland, all while straightening her already-perfect collar and adding that of course, she couldn’t leave, the Foreign Office being what it was these days. Busy. Terribly busy. The war meant work.

Sherlock had considered the idea of waiting it all out in what would doubtlessly be a spacious and charming house, full of the sort of people Mycroft approved of; had imagined letting Mycroft arrange her tickets, see that her luggage was packed properly and practically, remind her to exchange her currency, to mind her purse, to write or risk being called; she had imagined Mycroft coming to see her off, _best of luck_ ; and had resolved to join up the next day.

Before that, though—before the war—she had tried other things. 

In 1938, for instance, there was the whole mess with trying Dexedrine, and the falling-out which had never quite happened because she and Mycroft hadn’t been speaking to each other.

She had wondered why Mycroft had hated the little pills so much. That was all; she was twenty-one years old and curious. They were so innocuous; the colour of orange juice and therefore practically the shade of a healthy breakfast. And tiny. The really confusing part, these days at least, was that Sherlock could attest to the fact that they produced the effect Mycroft had wanted. Clothes hung off her and she barely cared to eat at all. As weight loss pills, they really couldn’t be faulted. But after going to the trouble of acquiring a prescription for them in 1938, Mycroft had only used them three times, shut away in her bedroom behind the door even Sherlock was sometimes afraid to knock on. And then she had flushed them all down the WC and never spoken of them again—not that she had spoken of them in the first place.

So Sherlock had made an appointment with Mycroft’s doctor and told him, “I need to lose weight. I’ve tried simply everything.”

She had been skinny even before trying them, but, “I want to see what’s so bad about them,” didn’t seem like it was likely to get her a prescription—although to be honest, it might have done. The doctor had barely glanced over at her before scrawling down his prescription. Sherlock had been counting on that; Mycroft hated all doctors, but she had a particularly bitter dislike for attentive ones with bright ideas. For the most part, she preferred to consider the medical community a means to an end rather than allow them to do anything so dangerous as come to their own conclusions. Of course her doctor would prescribe anything without asking irritating questions. Sherlock had thanked him as effusively as she knew how, and swanned off with her hand in her pocket to clutch the prescription like an amulet against boredom and not understanding her sister.

As it had turned out, there was nothing bad about them whatsoever. They made her feel direct—able to skim the surface of the earth and move forwards, instead of being pulled by her mind down a thousand different paths at once until she cracked along the fault lines and fell apart. Or that was usually how it was, at least. In the first few hours, that was how it was. In the first few months of taking them, that was how it was. After that, it was more that her mind creaked and oozed and spluttered to a halt when she didn’t have them—but by then there had been a war on, and Sherlock had been working, and no one was in good health, so what did it matter? At least they woke her up; she hadn’t used them nearly so liberally before 1939, when she had finally been prescribed Nembutal to make her sleep.

That particular prescription had come after other events in 1939. Other attempts to stake a claim on her own life. The ones which had caused Mycroft to remark, just as Sherlock was readying herself to take the train down to London for her interview:

“Mightn’t your record with the police cause some trouble?”

She remembered odd things about that day. She had been made-up and stiffly turned out, utterly resolute and oddly dead-feeling. Her mouth had tasted of cardboard. She had had a cigarette in hand as she stared blankly into the bluish depths of the mirror and plucked at the twin devil-horn rolls of hair, one at each temple. She hadn’t looked like herself; she hadn’t felt like herself. The hail had been rattling the windows of the old house; it seemed to have been rattling them for twenty three years. Her sanitary belt had somehow gotten tangled with her suspender belt and the knot was digging into her. She had meant to duck into the lavatory and sort it all out before she left, but in the end—

“Mightn’t your record with the police cause some trouble?”

“No, they wouldn’t damn themselves by keeping records,” she muttered, narrowing her eyes at the mirror, for a moment not catching Mycroft’s meaning. Her brain felt wrung-out, like a dishrag squeezed of all moisture and dropped back in the sink. Too numb with the shock of her own decision to think. And then the implication dripped down into her brain like cold water down the back of her neck. What Mycroft—mistress of the concerned telephone call, keeper of every record in the damned country—was threatening to do. She lowered her hand suddenly, smoke circling up around her face, and turned to try and pin Mycroft with her stare. “Don’t you dare.”

After all, she might not want, really, to be in the WAAF—she might have realised, even in the split second before announcing her decision, that she was consigning herself to grinding, ugly normality—but it was her decision all the same. Hers. And she would fight Mycroft away from it tooth and nail if she had to—

But Mycroft put down her newspaper and said, quite calmly, “I shan’t bother.”

Sherlock blinked, feeling suddenly untethered, as unbalanced as anyone playing tug-of-war would be to find their opponent suddenly letting go of the rope. Her mouth was dry as a grave. 

Mycroft looked at her patiently, as if she expected her to respond, though of course she knew that she couldn’t. While Sherlock groped for words, Mycroft got up and left. In doing so she removed all drama, all meaning, from how Sherlock crashed through the hallway of the family home, dragging her suitcase behind her, trying to make as much noise as possible so that Mycroft wouldn’t be able to avoid hearing her. 

She had flung herself out into the hail without an umbrella, and by the time she was in London she had bled through her skirt. It had been black enough to hide it, but she had seen the rusty stain on the train’s upholstery when she had gotten up. And then she had discovered that it wasn’t hailing in London; rather it was raining hard enough to turn the city into an aquarium, to drown the pavements and sluice through the gutters, water rattling against the street. She had felt gawked-at as she struggled past long panes of glass and bomb-ruins; by the time she had burst into the foyer of the Air Ministry she was soaked through and coughing, water dripping off her nose. To this day she didn’t know what she had been asked or how she had replied, because all she had been thinking during it was: _damn Mycroft to hell_ , over and over.

Sherlock was thinking about it now because she was on the noon train up to Inverness with nothing else to do stare at the world outside the window, which was slowly becoming both darker and greener as London lost its grip on it. That, and taking train journeys always made her think of all the other trains she had taken, getting lost in the familiar rattle of rails beneath her until her life seemed to be stretched between tracks and tunnels. Twenty five years spent being carried from one place to another. Down to London, away from London; up to Cambridge, down from Cambridge. (“I wasn’t sent down. Girton’s not technically a constituent college, so it’s not the same as being—”) 

She wanted a smoke; well, no, she wanted a Dexedrine. She could feel her mind starting to swamp, expanding fudgily until it pressed hard against the inside of her skull, the back of her eyes. Grey matter. That was a good phrase for it: _grey matter_. Thick and dormant. It reminded her of the dusty clutter at the back of her mother’s wardrobe, the cloying scent of mothballs and jasmine and old fabric. Just stuff. Endless _stuff_. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, patting around for her cigarettes with another hand, and lit one as she remembered another train journey, this one with Harding.

She hadn’t met him on the train, of course; she had met him in the control tower at RAF Tangmere, when she had been hunched over a wireless set with her headphones on, her mind flashing with dots and dashes and her wrist moving as she worked the key. She had been surrounded by other wireless operators, but when the door had opened and let in a swathe of cold air across her back, she had known that it was for her.

She had turned, and seen an unfamiliar major squared in the doorway. A WAAF whom Sherlock knew—Ellen, why Ellen?—was at his elbow. He had nodded, said something Sherlock didn’t hear through her headphones but which, from the shape of his mouth, was a greeting involving her name. Her headphones started to beep dots and dashes into her ears so she turned away and said, “I’m transmitting; come back later,” her voice loud in her own ears.

His hand had fallen onto her shoulder. She had grimaced and wrenched her headphones askew to jam just one of their discs between her left ear and left shoulder, hand fluttering off the key to reach for her pad and pencil. Dot dot dot.

“It’s about the black Lysanders, is it?” she had asked, still frowning at her wireless set, scribbling down the letters which corresponded to the dots and dashes yelling in her left ear. The way his hand tightened on her shoulder had been encouraging, and so she had smirked and added, “And the missing agent?” as she signed off an _S_ with a flourish and looked up at him.

They had had to leave right then, of course, so that Harding could regain control of the situation. Sherlock had gotten up from her seat and Ellen—ACW2 Jones—had slammed on Sherlock’s abandoned, still-warm headphones quick as she could. 

Harding had introduced himself, had let her pack her suitcase (and her face hadn’t changed as she dropped her washbag on top of her folded clothes, despite knowing the tiny, not-quite-illicit pastilles of chemical happiness it contained) and then shepherded her along so as not to miss the train. By then, with her ears both stuffed and tender from almost a full shift being pinched by her headphones and her back sore from hunching over her wireless set, she had been beginning to lose patience.

Losing patience on trains. A life spent losing patience on trains. Better or worse than a life spent in adherence to other people’s schedules? It probably didn’t matter. Maybe she didn’t want a Dexedrine, Sherlock thought dully, staring at her own curly, craggy reflection as the train dived into a tunnel and air got stuck in her ears. She wasn’t having one, anyway. She turned up her collar, then wilfully singed the upholstery while stubbing out her cigarette.

“That’s very rude,” said the woman in the seat opposite, whom Sherlock had already dismissed as a creature of burnt hair and undercooked personality. Sherlock ignored her and closed her eyes.

Harding had annoyed her. Not the way the woman opposite her now did; he was more interesting, so he had annoyed her much more. His rusty hair and the crumpled smile which hardened out when the tattered, comfortable act didn’t work—all of it had grated on her. And she had grated on him, she knew. He had a hard-working intelligence, and viewed swoops of genius as cheating.

And he had interpreted her deductions, her _investigations_ as swoops of genius. Which was exciting. Which was, yes, she dared to say accurate.

The black Lysanders were obvious, really. She had never been in wireless contact with them, but she had discovered them accidentally during a sleepless night. And after, she had watched them from her billet close by the airfield, having foregone her Nembutal each full moon to stand on her bed and peer out of the window as a matte black Westland Lysander swooped closer and trundled to a stop, or roared off into the sky, a great smooth shadow in the night. Some nights were busier than others, but they always left and arrived alone. 

Her own private airshow, she had thought, and smiled.

The implications of a plane painted jet black and flying by nothing but the visibility offered by a full moon were obvious, of course. The missing agent, though: that had been quite good, she thought, both proud and defensive of it.

It had taken Harding a while to get to it, though, perhaps because he could see that her explanation was ready and that she was eager to give it.

“Your schooling’s quite interesting.” He had had a file, which was meant to worry her. It had annoyed her instead. “France? And Switzerland, too. Three different convent schools. Very holy.” He had looked at her thoughtfully, raised his eyebrows, and repeated, in a different tone: “Very holy.”

“Indeed. My mother heard the phrase ‘patience of a saint’ and dared to hope.”

“For nothing, apparently, considering all three kicked you out.”

“Quite.”

“Didn’t peg you as a Catholic.”

“No, neither did they.”

And so on.

Eventually, with Sherlock’s fingernails leaving tiny pink half-moons in her palms, her conversation dwindling to snappish nos and yeses, more the former than the latter, Harding had asked her how she had worked it out.

“I saw it.”

“You saw it how?”

“By looking,” and when that hadn’t produced even a flicker of irritation from him, she had continued; “by tracking who came and went, _obviously_.”

Harding had protested. The black Lysanders were indistinguishable. Never mind telling them apart from each other; they weren’t even meant to be seen.

Sherlock had rolled her eyes. Yes, _quite_ , but it wasn’t a matter of seeing; it was a matter of observing.

It wasn’t the planes themselves which had tipped her off. They were all identical, particularly at night, and particularly from the distance she watched them from, peeking from behind blackout curtains and standing stock still so as not to wake any of the other women in the room. It was the way they were flown which let her differentiate.

Sherlock always found that there was almost something intimate about watching people who didn’t know they were being watched. It allowed her to observe—without _herself_ clouding the air, almost. It allowed her to see people unguarded. Her observations—reliable, numerical—were a much clearer window into the interiors of people’s minds than anything they said to her.

She hadn’t said that to Harding, of course. She hadn’t mentioned how much she had grown to like the pilot who leaned hard on the left when landing and always came down fast but never once bounced his wheels on the ground, tearing through the dark. She just described him.

She had first seen him—the exact wobbles of his wings as he took off, his hard-left landing later in the night—in December, though she had no doubt he had flown in and out of Tangmere before from how easily he navigated the airstrip; his landing wasn’t gossamer, but practice had made it first serviceable, and then skilled.

In December he had been like any other black Lysander pilot. He had left with a full plane and arrived back with a full plane; different passengers to the ones he had left with. Sherlock, through the crack in the blackout curtains, knew this because of the way they moved, nothing more; their clothing was usually indistinguishable in the gloom and the distance, though on occasion she caught a glimpse of bulky, unnatural shapes on the backs of the outgoing passengers and thought: parachutes.

On the second of January, by the light of the full moon, the pilot left alone and he came back alone. Sherlock, who at that point had been going slightly stir crazy under the constant dashes and dots and the frantic drudgery of war work, had considered it an early birthday present.

“A pilot in a black Lysander flew out and in again on his own. So what?” Harding asked, feigning boredom, though his tone suggested there was a right answer.

“So everything, obviously.”

The pilot had done the same thing on the first of February; the same thing on the third of March. Leaning harder on the left each time. The fourth time he carried out his lonely routine—the first of April—he bounced on the landing like he _never_ did, and Sherlock’s fingers tightened hard on the sill. In the bed beside hers, Ellen turned over, and Sherlock’s skin prickled; she looked away quickly, then looked back, and there he was, the pilot with the hard-left landing, an indistinct shadow slamming his hand against the nose of his black Lysander and leaning into the personal space of another person out on the airstrip with him. They were bent in towards each other, their shoulders squared, arguing in the blackout gloom.

“So you knew. Right then. That there had to be a missing man.”

“Yes. Of course. What else could have happened?”

“You had no way of knowing what—”

“If he had the same destination in mind as the other pilots—France—and yet not the same objective—”

“Bombing.”

“Please. I can see when a plane’s got something to drop.”

“Recon.”

“No time.”

“Dropping supplies.”

“No. Whatever he was doing in France, he wasn’t succeeding; hard to imagine an experienced black Lysander pilot would repeatedly fail to drop supplies in the right place. Harder to imagine you’d keep giving him chances if the problem was on his end. He was clearly getting frustrated with missions that looked promising but repeatedly came to nothing. ”

“How do you know it was France?”

“Because I analysed the length of their flights and sat down with a map. And because despite the fact that I spent much more time being educated in Switzerland than I did in France, at least prior to university, just now you mentioned France first and with more interest. It’s obviously got some particular relevance to your work.”

Harding had fallen silent at that, leaving Sherlock to smile and continue.

“It wasn’t usual for pilots to be sent off on the same task each month. Mostly, they changed around reasonably frequently—I imagine they received orders to fly on short notice. But he was given the same job each time around, and with nothing to show for it. He kept going to pick up someone, someone special, who couldn’t be put with anyone else; everyone else was shipped in and out en masse, after all. Perhaps he’s dangerous, perhaps he was simply in an area no one else could reach. He was certainly different. But he never showed up. I assume messages were sent, communications were made—but he was never where he should have been. And increasingly you began to suspect you were being made idiots of. And so did the pilot you were sending on monthly wild goose chases.”

On the train up to Inverness, Sherlock exhaled in an enormous rush, as if trying to get every bit of air out of her body because it insulted her. A wild goose chase. Well, she knew how that felt.

This was useless. She was groping clumsily around in things she already knew, turning over the scant facts she had been given in case she had missed anything and only succeeding in making her brain whine in complaint. She opened her eyes and thought about pills; then closed her eyes, and thought about Joan Watson instead. She would see her later today. In a few hours, in fact.

 _I gather you’ve made a friend_ , Mycroft had—had simpered, her eyes cold and her mouth twisted. Sherlock pressed her lips together. She didn’t want Mycroft to be right. But she didn’t want to let go of the idea of Joan being her friend, either.

That was awful. Embarrassing, messy, juvenile. But it was easier to stomach when Sherlock stopped thinking about a friend, and how Mycroft’s voice had curdled on the phrase, and just concentrated on Joan. Khaki wool and dirty-blonde pink-toed hard-jawed Joan. What had she been doing, Sherlock had to wonder, crouching down in front of her and working on her sock for her? What sort of absurd expression of not finding someone abhorrent was _that_? And saying those stupid things in front of her, too. _How’s your murdered man, Harding?_

“Actually,” Harding had said, as the train rattled them closer and closer to Wanborough, “we’re beginning to suspect that our missing man has been done in. And not by the Germans.”

_You’re not really here in the same way the rest of us are, are you?_

Joan didn’t know how right she had been, and in how many different ways.

_Whatever you like, Sherlock. Your choice._

Sherlock rather wanted to tell her everything, but she always wanted strange things when she was on the verge of passing out. She could feel her mind shuddering and scattering as she began to slip down into a black, flat sleep, just like she had predicted she would. Her thoughts fanned out and blinked into nothing like constellations of nonsense, of stuff, glinting in the dark. Just grey matter. Dead. We’re beginning to suspect he’s been done in. _How’s your murdered man, Harding?_ Khaki lisle and Joan’s sandy hair like tarnished gold, her gritted voice and angry grip. Hands on her arms. Holding her still, down, keeping her in the real world. _That would be the boring option._ Sherlock urgently wanted not to be the boring option, and wanted not to be bored—to never be bored—to never be so bored she tried to claw herself out of herself—to never be that bored again. And Joan—and _Joan_ — 

She felt whole body shocks whenever Joan looked at her. Joan had a grip like a vice. Had hard fingers. Had sandy hair, cheeks pinkened by weather and wear and a tiny dip in the middle of her chin, another at the tip of her nose. Told Sherlock, “Your choice.” Had once frequented jazz clubs—the jazz clubs in Montmartre.

They were in Inverness, and the woman with the burnt hair was gripping her arms and shaking her awake and Sherlock’s mouth tasted sickly. “Alright,” she tried to groan, but realised she couldn’t breathe and came reeling forwards and to the side, coughing and heaving, hacking, vomit finally dripping from her mouth and onto the seat beside her.

Well, she thought, dizzy and disgusted, with fear burning wide swathes of panic through her mind, well, there had been no need to worry about the cigarette burns on the upholstery after all, not when this was so much worse.

“Are you alright?” the woman was gasping, and Sherlock, hair hanging over her face, mouth tasting sour, wondered how the answer could possibly be _yes_. Tremors were gripping her; she felt freezing cold, and realised her teeth were all but chattering. “You stopped breathing, I think, you were—you were _choking_ —”

The woman’s hands were still on Sherlock’s arms. Sherlock wondered why people who didn’t like her—Mycroft, Sally, this awful stranger with her reeking perfume—were always so invested in seeing her breathe. “I’m fine,” she said dully, wiping her mouth, trying to haul in her breath. She hadn’t thrown up much. Tea and bile, mainly. Her mouth tasted faintly of saccharin.

“But you—”

“I’m fine, I just,” Sherlock began dazedly, aware that she couldn’t possibly tell the truth. This was almost definitely the result of cutting down on her pills. Oh, God, why couldn’t people leave well enough alone? She had been fine before, and now she was shaking and sick and exhausted and all her schedules were thrown off.

“Have you been drinking?”

Sherlock broke, and snarled, “For God’s sake, get your hands _off_ me!”

That did it. The woman looked disgusted and left the carriage, cheeks angrily flushed. Sherlock wiped her mouth again, then grabbed her case and struggled to the nearest WC on the train and had a hazy, angry argument with a conductor, who told her to use the lavatory in the station. She decided to swallow a Dexedrine, then decided not to, then changed her mind, all in a horrible, shimmering second of indecision as she weaved and staggered along the carriage. Finally she stumbled onto the platform and crashed into the ladies’ there, splashing her face with cold water and rinsing out her mouth. She hovered over the sink for a few nervous seconds, in case she was going to throw up again. Behind her, a woman with a tiny, angry mouth and all the stern hallmarks of Scottish Presbyterianism hurried her teenage daughter out with a revolted look, and Sherlock caught the sound of, “...girls drunk in public is exactly what comes of...” before the door slammed closed and she was alone. She heaved once, then twice, shoulders clenching and her fingers scrabbling for purchase on the slippery off-white porcelain, but she didn’t actually vomit, and once she was sure she wasn’t going to, she looked upwards with relief.

There was sweat beading on her forehead, and the collar of her purple blouse was drenched with it. She met her own eyes in the mirror, breathed in, thought _not today_ , and turned up her coat collar. She left the little orange pills tucked into her washbag, deep in her suitcase. When she left the WC, she felt more composed. Still, that wasn’t saying much.

The street outside the station was lit with blue light to bewilder German pilots. As a result it seemed to exist underwater, an impression only aided by the film of chilly rain which didn’t really fall but instead just hung in a weak, turquoise drizzle, dampening the air. Sherlock stood stock still in the midst of the shambling crowd with her suitcase dangling at her side, feeling at sea. She was trying to remember how she had planned to get from here to the address she had been given. ( _Swordland Lodge, Loch Morar, Inverness-shire—most of the girls are going to be up in Scotland, but we’ve no objection to you spending your weekend in London if you can prove you’ve somewhere respectable to sleep; we’ll organise tickets up to Inverness for you_ ). And she was trying , too, to feel somewhat less like she was going insane.

But it was difficult, frozen here in the blue, to feel anything else. Shapes blurred in the rain, made her head swim. She was suddenly stretched tight between a thousand different possibilities. She could take a taxi; no, she ought to telephone; but what was the number? Oh, stupid, _stupid_ , she had seen it a thousand times and yet when she made a lurching movement towards the nearest phonebox, purple in the gloom, she remembered that no, she hadn’t any change on her. So she staggered backwards in a twitching movement like she had been stung and looked around, and wished the lights weren’t so blue and so dull, so blue they made everything far away and unfriendly. 

“Sherlock!”

What?

“What?” she said aloud, and turned, though she knew the answer.

Joan was leaning against a car which gleamed blackly in the dark, her hand raised and her cap askew. Her teeth were brilliant in the night. Somehow, despite the world being mad and nothing making sense, she was grinning.

Sherlock cut through the crowds towards her, hauling air down into her lungs for what felt like the first time in far too long. Relief swelled in her chest, bright and buoyant. She felt absurdly like Joan had just dragged her out of a dangerous undertow. “Joan,” she said, fervently and stupidly, and then her face flushed hot with embarrassed annoyance. “You’re here—why are you here?”

“Took a leaf out your book,” Joan said, laughing; at her, Sherlock wondered? Nausea welled up inside her again. But no, Joan was just laughing, quite harmlessly. There was nothing wrong. She actually made it look quite—quite nice, in her way. Laughing. Sherlock swallowed, and wavered, deciding to concentrate on Joan and Joan alone. “Made friends with the FANYs. How are you?”

“Oh,” said Sherlock, “you know. Fine. I don’t make—”

“I know you don’t,” Joan said, reaching out a hand. Sherlock blinked down at her strong-looking fingers, one of her knuckles scored over with a scab where she had cut it while clearing an obstacle course, and only then realised that Joan was offering to take Sherlock’s suitcase. Sherlock handed it to her, and watched her knock open the boot to throw it inside. She felt a sudden flicker of dull unease, remembering how she had half dreamt about Joan gripping her arms, when really the grip had been that of the obnoxious life-saving stranger who had shared her compartment on the train. And not Joan at all. She had been half asleep, she protested to herself, and refused to wonder if she had been correct—if Joan’s fingers would be hard and sure as they dug into her upper arms. 

“But I can’t terrify people into submission, so I have to go the long way and use my winning personality,” Joan was saying. “Vanessa had orders to pick you up anyway, I just had to plead my way into being allowed to come along for the ride. The course hasn’t actually started yet, so no one’s paying much attention to us, and I felt like a trip out. So. Thought I might as well. You getting in?”

“Yes,” Sherlock said after a moment, a little numbly, and got inside.

It was a staff car; a glossy Wolseley with cool brown leather seats, being driven by a woman in sharp FANY khaki. Sherlock’s heart ceased to vibrate quite so frantically against the bars of her ribs. Still, she thought of what Joan might think if she discovered Sherlock had thrown up in public—had been, for a moment, stretched thin enough to break between phoneboxes and taxis and streetlights and all the thousands of possible choices offered by this bewildering world. She felt ill, and tightened her fists in her lap. “Vanessa, this is Sherlock,” Joan was saying to the driver, who was watching them in her rearview mirror, her slender dark eyebrows arched. “Sherlock—no? You don’t like introductions, alright. You okay?”

“Yes,” Sherlock said. She had stayed silent because her mind had been too caught up in private agonies to notice that Joan was trying to introduce her to Vanessa—Vanessa who, Sherlock suddenly realised, probably shouldn’t even be speaking to her passengers, never mind letting Joan come along for the ride. “I’m fine.”

“Good.”

“Yes.” _Say something other than yes._ “You’re—well?” _Something other than that._

“What? Yeah, I’m fine,” Joan said, taking off her cap and scrubbing her hand through her short dirty-blonde hair, smiling up at Sherlock with a sort of patient confusion. Vanessa was pulling out into the street, and the blue streetlights outside hit the car window one after the other.

“I wanted to ask,” Joan said suddenly, and at the same time Sherlock said, “I believe I should tell you,” and they both stopped, looking at each other with a strange hungry wariness, careful not to cast furtive looks at Vanessa.

“When we get there,” Sherlock said dismissively. She turned away from how the lights lit up Joan’s face one by one as they passed by, flashing bright—bright—bright, and tipped her head back against the leather headrest, suddenly exhausted all over again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading!
> 
>  **"Her sanitary belt had somehow gotten tangled with her suspender belt"** \- Alas, poor Sherlock, who does not live in the age of convenient [menstrual solutions](http://file.vintageadbrowser.com/l-6475a00fmnlsb9.jpg). (Do any of us?)
> 
>  **"Girton’s not technically a constituent college"** \- Women were not able to be full members of the University of Cambridge until 1948. (Oxford modernised slightly earlier, meaning that Mycroft, who is a St Hilda's woman, actually has a degree—what do you mean, I've thought up too much about side character backstories?)
> 
>  **"a matte black Westland Lysander"** \- [Visual reference.](http://www.airpowerworld.info/other-military-aircraft/raf-westland-lysander.jpg)
> 
>  
> 
>  **"lit with blue light to bewilder German pilots"** \- I came across this in 'A Perfect Spy', Le Carré, and immediately seized upon it. Blue light was used when the black out was being enforced but some places had to be lit, it seems like. I'd never heard of it before, and it baffled me when I discovered it was a thing, because surely something as eerie and atmospheric as that would be in every war film from here to god knows where. It's not, though, so I did my bit and put it in my odd little war fanfic.


	6. The Jazz Clubs In Montmartre.

“Okay,” Sherlock said. “You’ve got questions.”

They were huddled by the rocky grey face of Swordland Lodge and watching the loch pool blackly in front of them, surrounded by the silent walls of the hills. Sherlock lit a cigarette, and glanced to Joan with an offer in her eyes, lighter still flicked open. Joan caught the expression thrown into relief by dancing orange flame, and after a moment of hesitation she nodded. Sherlock held out her packet of cigarettes, and then her lighter.

Puffing out smoke, pulling her sleeves tighter down over her hands and rubbing her own arms, Joan said, “Yeah. Harding’s murdered man.”

“Yes.”

“What’s that all about, exactly?”

Sherlock smiled, and leaned her head back, breathing out a cloud of smoke. It turned silver in the moonlight. “You were right,” she said. “I’m not here in quite the same capacity as the rest of you.”

Different, Joan reminded herself; she’s far away, clever, rich, different from you. Something in her chest whined. She told it, rather viciously, to shut up. “So you’re not training to...”

“Oh, I am. France.”

“Mm.”

“I just happen to know what they want me to do there.” Sherlock inspected the end of her cigarette and flicked ash. It crumbled downwards, a brief winking snowfall, and was lost to the black ground. “I used to investigate crimes.”

“What, you were a WPC?”

“God no. I used to _investigate_ crimes, not hang around making tea for female detainees.” Joan laughed. Sherlock grinned in the dark. She was wearing her WAAF greatcoat over civvies; it flapped around her in the wind, and Joan was extraordinarily jealous of how warm it looked. The wind, which had been a pleasant breeze during the day, had swept up into a toothy chill which couldn’t be right for early June. The wind was going right through her stockings; she hadn’t dared head down to the station in battle dress, but now she wished—a familiar wish—that she had been braver.

“So you were—what? A private detective?”

“Consulting detective. I investigated crimes when the police were out of their depth. Which was always.”

“And they took kindly to that, did they,” Joan said, her voice grim and amused as she imagined Sherlock, snapping through clouds of smoke, fingers nervously tapping out ash as she tried to explain the workings of her mind to some poor copper just trying to get his shift over and done with.

Sherlock took a few moments to respond, and Joan felt her amusement slip slightly. “It was after I left Cambridge. There were complications,” Sherlock said finally. She spoke about her life as if it had been a long illness. “The point is, I thought it was all forgotten.”

Joan looked carefully at the end of her cigarette, and not at Sherlock. Sherlock hadn’t forgotten, clearly. Still, all Joan said was, “I take it it wasn’t.”

“Apparently not. I gather you had an interview? I didn’t. Harding came in to collect me from RAF Tangmere the day before the course was due to start.”

“Because he wanted you to investigate a crime.”

“That and I speak French. You’ve seen what he thinks of me; I wouldn’t be here unless I really was,” a flick of ash, an inexplicable sneer souring her voice, “ _perfect_ for the job. Lestrade, by the way, was in charge of chaperoning me after Harding and I got off the train. He rode with me in the car up to Wanborough Manor and tried to get more out of me by being nice to me. That’s how I know him, if that can be called an acquaintance.”

“So the murdered man—”

“Went missing in France. They’ve no reason to suspect he was killed by the Gestapo, but—” Sherlock ashed her cigarette when she was annoyed, Joan had noticed, and now she was flicking it rhythmically, the tiny orange glow of the cigarette-end bobbing in the dark “—they haven’t told me why they’ve no reason to suspect that. They just think he’s dead, and they’d like to know why: they work in intelligence, after all. I can’t imagine they like having blind spots.”

“And that’s all? A man’s dead in a war?”

“Is that such a small thing?”

“No. It’s—you know what I mean.”

“Before he died, he sent various different communications: distress calls, arrangements for his being brought back to England, all made from different wireless outposts in France. Probably four messages in total. He failed to make a single rendez-vous. According to what Harding told me, at least—although he wasn’t particularly willing to tell me anything.” Sherlock’s mouth hitched up at the side; she fit her cigarette between her lips and then blew out a plume of smoke into the dark, very slowly, before continuing. “Most of it I worked out myself from analysing the comings and goings of planes at the airfield.”

“Well, that’s unsurprisingly impressive,” Joan snorted. Sherlock gave her a look which might have been startled—it was hard to tell in the gloom—and then _hmm_ ed into her cigarette, sounding confused and pleased. “What?”

“Nothing. Harding was surprised.”

“Yeah, well. Go on, what else?”

Sherlock turned up her collar and for a moment didn’t answer. When she did speak, her voice was vague and thoughtful; she was holding up her cigarette vertically, between thumb and forefinger, frowning at it. “Do these taste odd to you?”

“The—no?”

“Hn. Really must have a chat with my buyer.”

“Your—” Joan glanced at the cigarette smouldering in her own hand. “Sherlock, are these black market?”

Sherlock turned to her, her eyebrows up. “Oh, _don’t_ ,” she said, sounding exasperated.

“I’m not,” Joan sighed, sticking the cigarette back into her mouth; she’d started, she supposed, so she might as well see it through to—now that she thought about it, yes—the bitter end. “I’m not. So that’s what you were doing in London, was it?”

Sherlock’s mouth wrenched to the side in a parody of a smile. “No. I was associating with much worse,” she said, and spat out smoke with a sudden violence. Breathing in, she leant back and raised her chin above the reaches of her collar, creating a triangle between the white line of her jaw and the black fabric.

“You—right...”

But the moment for Sherlock’s mysterious vitriol was over, and she was moving on, finally addressing the question of what else there was to say about the murdered man; apparently her diversion had led her down a worse path than the original question would have. “Harding hasn’t told me more,” she said. “There’s a British spy missing in France, suspected dead, probably murdered, and at least four different messages assuring his handlers in Britain that if they’d send a plane to an as-yet-unspecified location, he’d board it and come home. And he didn’t.” She flicked her cigarette again—again—again—her wrist twitched, the light jumped. Hard streams of smoke billowed from both nostrils. Her face was hard, her voice cool. “I haven’t seen the messages, I haven’t seen the official information on him, I don’t even know his name, because Harding’s trying to use it as a carrot to get me through this _charade_ of training. And, of course, because he doesn’t actually trust me, despite wanting me to do his job for him.”

For a few moments, they smoked in silence. Sherlock finished her cigarette, and Joan saw that her hand was shaking as she pushed it through her hair and then hugged her greatcoat closer to herself. Joan offered the remaining half of her smoke, and Sherlock blinked and then took it.

“So what are you going to do?” Joan asked her finally.

“Oh, well.” A sharp drag, almost a hiss. Sherlock’s voice was incongruously brittle and bright, winding sardonically around her words, and again Joan was struck a disconcerting sense of having heard it somewhere else entirely, unconnected to Sherlock as she was now. “Stiff upper lip?”

Which meant the answer was obvious. Joan frowned out at where the hills unsettled the horizon as if someone might have scrawled a hint on the landscape. “Oh,” she said, the answer crashing in like a burst of light. “Oh. Looking through Lestrade’s stuff. You were looking for more information on what Harding wants you to do in France.”

Sherlock gave a smoky chuckle as rain started to patter on the loch, whispering through the ragged countryside. The clouds shifted; the hills were black on black, collapsed monoliths. Was it Joan’s imagination, or did Sherlock huddle slightly closer as she shifted her weight? “Obviously,” said Sherlock. “Didn’t pay off, of course. Nothing about the murdered man. Plenty about you, though.”

“Oh?”

“Star pupil.”

Joan laughed. Sherlock was definitely closer, she thought. She could feel the warmth radiating off her in the dark. “Yeah, right. And you?”

“Not mentioned once.”

Joan watched her face, trying to work out if she was serious or not. Sherlock handed back the cigarette, and when she did, her hot, damp fingers brushed against Joan’s. Joan started, and completely by accident, said, “God, you’re boiling.”

Sherlock went still. “Oh,” said Joan. “Right.”

“I’ve cut down,” Sherlock said shortly. “On the pills. Coming in?”

“Yeah,” Joan muttered, hurrying her last gasps of smoke and tossing the cigarette down on the ground, flattening it with her shoe as she jogged after Sherlock, who was already striding off in the direction of the door. Suddenly, she stopped, and yelled, “Wait!”

Sherlock stopped, and half turned. “What?”

“I need to tell you—I didn’t get a chance at Wanborough.” Joan was hurrying closer, cutting up the distance between them. Sherlock stood stock still, the moon lighting up the perfect tension on her face. “Listen, that ’phone call I got—it wasn’t from any sergeant in Newcastle. I don’t know who it was, but—”

“But the person calling asked about me,” Sherlock said.

Joan stared. “Yeah,” she said, “yeah, they did. How...?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Sherlock turned on her heel, her coat billowing in the dark like huge black wings. “Best not to pay her too much attention. Coming?”

“Yeah,” said Joan. “Coming.”

* * *

The first pill bottle hit Joan on the back of her head, making her yell and fumble with the clasp of her bra as she tried to fasten it behind her back. The second one she dodged, while still determinedly facing the wall. “Sherlock, what the—can we _please_ wait until I’m dressed for the projectiles to begin, can that _please_ be a rule—”

“Count them,” Sherlock said, and Joan’s shoulders lowered slightly, realising: pill bottles, _oh_ —oh, no. She swallowed, fixed her bra clasp, and pulled her shirt over her shoulders, holding it closed with folded arms as she turned. Sherlock’s stare was straight and blue and Joan couldn’t quite work any words out of her mouth. They got stuck at the back of her throat, though her lips were open.

Molly—with just her head poking out of a shapeless cylinder of blankets as she struggled to get dressed without leaving bed—had gone still, but apparently hadn’t meant to: a guilty look crossed her face when she realised she was staring, and she renewed whatever enigmatic rituals were going on beneath the blankets with fresh gusto, concentrating on the ceiling. But across the room, Sally was folding her arms, raising her eyebrows, her mouth open. “Right, I see,” she said. “I see.”

“Do shut up,” Sherlock yawned, her eyes flicking briefly up to Heaven in a way which suggested she wasn’t so much praying for patience as she was sharing her exasperation with the Almighty himself. Sally gave a hard, disbelieving laugh, shaking her head.

“It’s not,” Joan said to her, but Sally threw her hands into the air and turned away from them both.

“I don’t care,” she said, and her voice was thick with scorn and anger. Joan swallowed, her lips thin, and looked to Sherlock.

“ _Count_ them,” she said. “The pills? All of them? No, Sherlock. That’s not reasonable.”

“Fine. Keep them,” Sherlock said, shrugging.

“What?”

“Keep them. Give them to me when I need them, as opposed to when I want them. Yellow pills wake me up, white pills knock me out, it’s very simple. I leave the rest at your discretion. I’ve already had today’s AM dosage, if you were curious.”

Joan hadn’t been curious. Sherlock’s face was clammy, hard-edged, bright. Exhausted but charged. The cause hadn’t been any particular mystery.

Why do this now, Joan wondered? They had been alone last night, smoking out by the loch and discussing everything which had gravitated, quite naturally, towards being a secret between them. So why was Sherlock standing there in broad, unforgiving daylight, her pale eyes sticky with sleep like they always were in the mornings, demanding that Joan dispense her pills for her without so much as lowering her voice?

As soon as Joan thought it, of course, she understood it. She sighed and looked down, concentrating on buttoning up her shirt. Sherlock could never do anything by halves. If she had to cut down on her pills, she’d refuse to be quiet about it. It had to be a song and dance, to prove how—how unashamed she was.

The silence pressed in on her.

“Yeah,” said Joan, looking up, fixing her top button. “Yeah, absolutely. Whatever you like. Come on, get dressed, we can’t be late for breakfast on the first day.”

Sherlock gave a triumphant smile and whirled off so quickly that Joan almost didn’t avert her eyes in time. She blinked hard at the wall as Sherlock whipped her pajama top off, though the whisper of the fabric against the floor was almost fatal.

A deep breath, a tie resolutely knotted, and then it was time for breakfast. Joan tried to catch Sherlock on her own as they hurried through the corridors, but Sherlock began interrogating Molly on, for whatever reason, sketching, having apparently deduced a hobby, though Joan had never seen Molly wield a pencil. (“Any good?” “Um, probably not.” “So you are.” “I’m not awful.” “You should show your drawings to me.” “I—” “Also, do you have a pencil?” “Not—not handy.” “Ah. Shame.”) It was no use; she would have to wait. So she steeled herself to do just that, and turned her thoughts to breakfast.

Joan had expected Harding to follow them to Scotland, but he was nowhere to be seen. Halfway through breakfast, the rattle of cutlery and the burble of chatter was all stopped by an unfamiliar face. 

Major Lawrence Bannager was a wiry Scot who appeared to have been hewn from the same grey stone as Swordland Lodge itself. He didn’t bother with Harding’s style of cocky, rough address; instead he stood up, snapped, “Welcome to Swordland Lodge. You’ll find this is where it gets difficult.” For a moment that seemed to be all. Sherlock and Joan, both with their mugs of tea halfway to their mouths, shared a blank glance. For a moment, Joan worried that she would laugh—Sherlock’s eyebrows had reached an extraordinary height, and her poker face was perfect—but fortunately Bannager broke his own silence. “Today,” he said, “you will begin your training in elementary demolition under Captain Carter.”

And that really was all. He sat down. The clatter resumed, and so did the babble of voices, starting up slowly and then returning to its bubbling heights.

“We _are_ blessed,” Sherlock said, putting down her mug without taking a drink and brushing her mouth with her thumb as if trying to wipe crumbs away when really she was covering up the slightest curve of a smile. “Someone who doesn’t chatter.”

Across from her, Sally gave a half-laugh. Sherlock gave her a sharp, curious look, apparently not having expected Sally to even acknowledge her.

“I miss Major Harding,” Molly sighed. “I really never thought I’d say that.”

“Elementary demolition?” Joan said, bewildered, and unwilling to name her best guess in case it was wrong and revealed too much about the workings of her mind.

Her suspicions, however, proved to be completely correct. Sherlock smirked sidelong at her and said, “ _Boom_ ,” throwing out all ten fingers to mime a bomb blast.

Joan grinned slowly, shaking her head, some of her worry easing. Outside, the day had turned bright and sharp. The sun was blushing through the long, stern windows, as tentative as if it were unsure of its own security clearance.

* * *

“Ow,” said Sherlock, sounding mildly interested as she examined the fingers of her right hand. The index fingernail was blackened over with a stripe of soot, some of the flesh turned pink and puffy. She sat back on her heels to inspect the damage, blue serge skirt pulled tight over her parted knees.

“Idiot,” said Joan, leaning forwards on her knees in the damp grass and taking Sherlock’s hand to inspect the burn. “That would be why you shouldn’t play _what happens when I hit it_ with explosives.”

“Well, the results were interesting.”

“It blew up.”

“Exactly.”

“There are probably better times to have a smoke, as well,” Joan murmured, still squinting at Sherlock’s finger. Above her, she heard Sherlock scoff around her cigarette.

So far, their training in demolition had been much less cautious than their firearms training. Captain Carter apparently didn’t believe in the soft touch, having opted, after a very rushed and impatient discussion of the possible adverse health effects of playing with incendiary materials, to give them tiny samples of said materials along with various mysterious devices for their detonation and order them to investigate. All twenty or so of the students—the number distinctly and somewhat ominously reduced, with Lestrade being one of the men who hadn’t returned—were spread out on a stretch of grass between Swordland Lodge and the loch, experimenting. Which was why, when Sherlock said, “From his fingers, Carter smokes while he works with explosives,” Joan said, “Carter’s mad.”

Sherlock just snorted. Joan rolled her eyes, grinning, and dropped Sherlock’s hand, then clenched her fist lazily over and over again as if she were fidgeting rather than exorcising the memory of Sherlock’s skin against hers from her mind. “You’ll live.”

“Mm.”

Joan licked her lips, throat working, and finally said, “Sherlock. Also.” Sherlock looked up. “About the pills. I’ll put up any charade you like for Sally’s sake, I’ll help you out, but I don’t want to be your jailer.”

Sherlock’s eyes dimmed strangely, and she seemed on the verge of opening her mouth to say something when she stopped. Joan recognised the hunting-dog flicker of Sherlock’s features that meant they were about to be interrupted. She stood up quickly, lacing her hands behind her back; beside her, Sherlock sighed and hauled herself to her feet. They left the mess of metal and fuses and tiny pieces of explosive on the grass at their feet.

“Palm-reading, is it, Watson?”

Captain Carter was a broad, dark man with flashing black eyes and a highly-charged deftness about him. His teeth seemed constantly gritted—not out of anger, but from some emotion so fervent it was nameless, and rushed through him like light. It was impossible to tell his age beyond discerning that he was over forty. Impossible for Joan, at least. Sherlock, Joan supposed, would know his age, and his marital status, and whether he had children, and whether he liked said children, and indeed precisely the origin of his obsession with explosives.

“Checking to make sure Holmes wasn’t injured, sir,” Joan rattled off, looking through him as best she could.

“I see.” Somewhere behind them, there was a loud noise, more of a pop than a bang, and an eruption of laughter. Carter glanced away from Sherlock and Joan for a moment to yell, “Very nice, chaps; aim bigger next time, eh?” Then his eyes returned to Sherlock, and Sherlock’s cigarette. “Smoking, Holmes?”

“Yessir.”

“Jolly good. Best to keep one’s hand in with the explosives no matter the circumstances. Open flames, dry conditions, noise, confusion; all good practice. You aren’t going to be working in the fireproof climes of the Scottish Highlands.”

Sherlock’s mouth gave a victorious spasm. “No, sir,” she agreed. And then, much more casually than she ever really said anything, she added; “Any clue where we will be working, then?”

Carter flashed a knowing grin. “Haven’t the faintest, m’girl.” Sherlock’s smile slipped, and she poured smoke out of her mouth with a roll of her eyes. Carter moved closer, crouching down by the explosive debris which Sherlock and Joan had both been prodding at earlier. The grass was singed.

“I don’t know,” he sighed, arching his thin black eyebrows and shaking his head. “Women and bombs. Funny thing, of course, is that you’re usually rather good at it. You were trying to load a pull switch, I see.”

Sherlock and Joan shared a look, sinking back down to sit in the grass. They hadn’t been told, in fact, what the heavy tube of metal they’d been handed was called or what it was for, but after Sherlock shrugged, Joan said, “Yeah, we were.”

“Not bad,” said Carter, “not bad at all for a first time. Looks like you just need to arrange the cap holder a bit more carefully. What exploded? Not an actual charge.”

“Just a percussion cap,” Sherlock said, frowning down at her burnt fingers again. “Didn’t get the proper explosives detonated.”

There was another bang from behind them, this one louder, and Carter stood up to yell, “Hey!” at a group of sheepish-looking RAF officers, then, to their considerable relief, “That’s _more bloody like it_ , chaps!”

“Mad,” said Joan as he moved off amongst the other students, blowing out her cheeks and then her breath and giving Sherlock a smile with raised eyebrows. “Complete nutter.”

“One suspects he’s got a nice slab of Explosive 808 waiting for him to come home.”

“I’d say he’s got a bit of gelignite on the side.”

Sherlock gave Joan an indecipherable look, her mouth threatening a smile without ever quite getting there. Joan grinned for both of them. “Speaking of which,” Sherlock said, puffing out one last thick stream of smoke and stubbing out her cigarette in the wet grass, “fancy causing a proper explosion?”

“ _God_ , yes.”

“Good,” Sherlock said cheerfully. “Because I’ve just worked out what the _point_ of this thing is. Thank God you haven’t fixed that stripe of yours yet.”

“Why, exactly?”

“I need a tripwire.” She extended one long hand. “Pull out a thread for me, will you? Long as you can. I’d like to test this under realistic circumstances.” Joan grinned, and started tugging, and Sherlock said, quite impassively, her hand still out: “I assume you’ve tried before. Being someone’s jailer.”

Joan’s fingers faltered for a moment on her stripe. “Yeah,” she said.

“Your sister likes a drink,” Sherlock said, and Joan ground her teeth together but kept silent, not wanting to get into any discussions on the subject of Harry, lest it lead to the issue of Harry not being a sister at all. “So you rationed out her alcohol.”

“Something like that. At one point. It didn’t work.”

“I’m not your sister.”

“No. And I don’t want you to be.”

“What on earth is that supposed to mean?”

“I mean that I can’t do what you’re asking me to do,” Joan said slowly, wrapping the thread tight around her fingers and snapping it. “I’ll keep an eye on you, all of that, and trust me, I can nag you. To hell and back.”

“I know that.”

“Good. But I’m not going to tell you when you can and can’t take those pills.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t think you’d forgive me for it.”

“I’m asking—”

“Right, you’re asking, and you’re not thinking. Come on. I’ve seen what happens when people try to dictate the rules to you.” That, at least, got a wry snuff of laughter from Sherlock, and Joan felt her own lips jerk in response. “I’m your friend, Sherlock. I would actually like to stay that way. You can set your own rules. And I...will personally murder you if you stray from them. But I’m not a doctor and you’re not my patient.” She dropped the thread into Sherlock’s palm, and slowly raised her eyes to her face. The sheer openness of Sherlock’s gaze was like a physical blow, a jolt to her stomach. “And I was promised a proper explosion. Get to it, genius.”

A pull switch, they learnt—through experimentation, and from the explanation Carter finally deigned to give—was a trap. When the safety pin was removed and a pull applied to the spring-loaded release pin via a tripwire, it would detonate a charge, or at least it would when properly prepared, which most had struggled to do without any kind of instruction. Between them, however, Sherlock and Joan had managed to set theirs off. (“Jesus!” “Oh, how fun.”) A pressure switch—Carter demonstrated merrily—was much the same, but with a pressure plate which bore down on a fragile strip of metal and broke it to set off its explosion. Spring-loaded switches—here Joan could predict the outcome—set off charges when a heavy load was removed from atop the device. Then there were time pencils, which Sherlock took to the instant Carter produced one in its dissolute parts.

He opened his mouth to start explaining, and she stopped him short with, “But there’s no way those can be reliable,” sounding delighted.

“You don’t know what it’s got to be reliable for yet, dear girl,” Carter pointed out. Sherlock waved him away, and started pointing out the various sections of the time pencil which he was demonstrating with. It was a thin metal tube, one end brass and the other copper, and beside it sat a glass capsule. Joan crossed her arms and frowned at it, and then at Sherlock.

“It’s a way of delaying the explosion once the actual explosive is in place, so you can vacate the premises,” Sherlock explained impatiently. “The copper tube is soft, so you can squeeze and break it, which suggests that the capsule is also meant to be broken, probably containing acid to dissolve a wire within the tube. That then releases a striker, setting off a percussion cap and detonator which in turn sets off the main charge. And while all this is happening, you’re running for your life. Yes?”

Carter looked at her with his mouth open for a moment, and then said, “Yes. Yes, quite correct, very well do—”

“But it can’t be reliable because hydrogen ion concentration depends on various equilibria, including temperature—...” People were staring at her. Sherlock stopped. “My God,” she said. “Look at you all, you’re so vacant. Acid. In the cold.” She mimed a mocking brr. “ _Works slower_.” She glanced to Joan, and complained, “ _You’ve_ got a scientific background, surely _you_ should understand?”

Joan, who had been following but keeping wilfully silent, opened her mouth and then clamped it shut. “I,” she said uneasily, flexing her left hand again. “No. I don’t. Not really. What gave you that idea?”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” Sherlock said, but Carter had found his voice again.

“Holmes is right. That’s how they work and, yes, that is why they aren’t as reliable as most people would like them to be. However. Sometimes, they’re all you’ve got, so we’re jolly well going to learn how to use them for that reason.” He smacked his hands down on the table where he had been setting out the innards of his various devices. “But not today. Off you trot now, all of you. More of this tomorrow. And! Wait!”

The whole class turned unwillingly back to him, and surveyed him where he stood with his brow furrowed, teeth on show, hands thrust in his pockets. “My usual proposition to all of you,” he shouted cheerfully at them. “I tell this to every class that comes through Swordland Lodge, and not many of them have ever found it working in their favour, though they’re all damned optimistic when they hear it. Any man who can fix a pressure switch or a pull switch or indeed a spring-loaded switch anywhere around this house and have it detonate its percussion cap before I can discover it, is owed a pint. We clear? Good! Dismissed!”

Joan only registered his proposal on the very fringes of her mind, already walking away, feeling her whole body buzzing once more with that terrified restlessness. Preoccupied.

* * *

A scientific background.

Once she got inside, Joan found that her heart was jolting angrily in her chest and her palms were slippery with sweat. Which was ridiculous. It was just a vague allusion to something she’d done, once, when she was younger. How Sherlock knew about it, Joan had no idea, but it didn’t matter.

Except it did. Inside herself, she was suddenly raging: after all the time she had spent fencing all of this off—

“Joan!”

—after the six word telegram which had cut her life short, after Persie crying, “I _won’t_ come with you, I _won’t_ leave,”—after seeing Harry waiting for her at the station when she got back from France, looking both younger and older than Joan had ever seen him, and after that sick wave of guilt which had waterlogged her and slowed her down and drowned out every other feeling for months—

“Joan!”

—after all that, now here Sherlock bloody Holmes was to throw off everything.

Joan rounded on her, but before she could say anything, Sherlock was stepping closer to her and demanding, in a voice tight with urgency, “What did I get _wrong_?”

Joan took a deep breath. For a few seconds she just stared straight forwards at Sherlock’s throat. She had the suggestion of an Adam’s apple. Beneath it: her crooked collar, her black WAAF tie. Finally, Joan looked up into her eyes.

“Nothing,” she said, her voice quiet and unstrained. She could feel herself retreating back inside her own personality and was grateful for it. “You got it all right. The bombs, the time pencils and me. Well done.” There was a lecture in French to go to. Joan started off, but Sherlock caught up with her, swooped around and blocked the way, staring right down into her eyes.

“Sherlock,” Joan said, very evenly.

They were standing right in the middle of a corridor, getting in the way, attracting glares and one mutter of, “Will you scratch each other’s eyes out elsewhere?” Sherlock blinked and finally seemed to register these details. She sniffed in her breath and straightened up.

“Fine,” she muttered, and swept off in the opposite direction to the rest of the crowd, surging right down the middle and making people step aside, a slash of navy blue in the corridor.

“Oh, God,” Joan muttered, looking from the fast-disappearing tails of Sherlock’s greatcoat to the shuffling crowd already weaving around her. And then she made a choice which she would make over and over again in her life, and set off after Sherlock, thinking, _wait, you idiot_.

She caught sight of a flicker of navy disappearing through an unmarked door, and caught the handle before it could close, pushing her way inside. “Sherlock—”

“You know what gelignite is,” Sherlock snapped at her. She was standing right at the far edge of the room with her arms folded, silhouetted against the window. “And phenobarbital, and dextroamphetamine. I was right. You don’t get that from a grammar school. You’ve had some formal scientific training, probably medical, and probably while you were in France.”

“Right,” Joan agreed, her voice hard and even, shutting the door behind her. “Fine, yes. The University of Paris. For two years. It was a stupid idea, because I was a stupid person with stupid friends who encouraged me. So don’t shout about it in public.”

“So for a while you wanted to be a woman doctor. And, horror of horrors, you were clever enough to get a scholarship to the Sorbonne. It’s hardly the secret of a century,” Sherlock scoffed, flouncing away from the wall and throwing herself down in one of the dusty chairs which occupied the room. There, Joan could see her better. She looked clammy, her fingers dancing with agonising restlessness on the arms of her chair. “Oh, _and_ you prefer to call it the University of Paris instead of the Sorbonne even though no one says that, because you think saying _the Sorbonne_ would be too pretentious.”

Joan breathed in and out slowly. “It’s,” she said, “it’s different for me, Sherlock.”

“Why?”

“ _Look_ at me.”

Sherlock did, and Joan regretted saying it. “You’re perfectly serviceable,” Sherlock said, her voice low.

Joan groaned, and rubbed her face, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Great.”

“So what, you ran out of money? And that’s embarrassing? Everyone ran out of money in Paris. That was what people went there to _do_.”

“No.” Joan shook her head emphatically, putting her hands on her hips. “It was, no. Nothing like that. I had the money. I worked, and I had a lot of friends who could—I kept track.” She was explaining uselessly but urgently, wanting to defend her borrowing even though she knew Sherlock wouldn’t care. “I kept track of what I owed them, and I tried to pay them back.”

Sherlock was sitting in the armchair, her cheek in her hand now, fingers at her mouth. Her eyes were narrowed and uncomfortably thoughtful. Joan wished she’d say something, but she stayed completely silent, as if in mental communication with things outside of Joan’s understanding. The silence pressed in on them both. Joan swallowed, and continued because there was no other option. “I was in my second year when I got a telegram saying that my mum was ill,” she said shortly, remembering _MUM SICK PLEASE COME HOME HARRY_ , “and I realised it was no good playing at being a doctor when people back home, in real life, actually needed me.”

It broke the spell. Sherlock dropped her hand and sniffed, apparently having come to a verdict. Joan waited. And Sherlock shrugged as she got up. “In _real life_ ,” she murmured, her tone rather cruel. Joan stiffened, and Sherlock raised a hand and shook her head, in a gesture which Joan very much hoped meant _ignore me_. “We’re late for our lecture.”

“Yes,” said Joan, not moving. “We are.”

“When were you in France, out of curiosity?” Sherlock asked. “End of the thirties, was it?”

Joan watched her dust down her coat and stride closer. “Yeah,” she replied. “Went over in 1935, came back in 1938.”

Sherlock stopped, right in front of her. “I have to say, I’m impressed.”

“Really.”

“You said you were working. Between a medical education and visiting those jazz clubs in Montmartre, however did you find the time?”

They were looking right at each other. Joan’s heartbeat was perfectly even. She knew because it was thudding in her ears, pulsing through her. She licked her lips, thinned them out, clenched her fists. “There were clubs,” she said, evenly and brightly, “where women could work behind the bar. In Montmartre.”

Sherlock gave her a look which spanned centuries. Then she offered, quite casually, “I was at the Conservatoire de Paris in 1937. If only I’d frequented jazz clubs, we might have met each other much earlier.”

Joan swallowed, and worked her face into a careless smile. “Maybe. Let’s go to that lecture.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Chapter seven will be posted on Monday, 12th August.
> 
>  **"Swordland Lodge"** \- Visual references [1](http://ness64.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/loch-morar-mar-11-116.jpg?w=500&h=375) and 2. Cheery, right?
> 
>  **"But there’s no way those can be reliable"** \- They weren't, and for precisely the reasons Sherlock explains. Agents apparently had a particular horror of the 5/10 minute delays, which were the most dangerous. More information on various explosive traps used by SOE (though this page refers to the Auxiliary Units, a stay-behind force created as a ready-made resistance in case Britain was ever occupied, rather than any of the country sections who sent agents abroad) can be found [here](http://www.auxunit.org.uk/gbradfordexplosives.htm).
> 
>  **"My usual proposition to all of you"** \- The most belief-stretching part of the story, surely. A total departure from realism. Except I got it out of Peter Churchill's semi-autobiographical novel 'Of Their Own Choice'. Churchill (no relation, although he once escaped being killed by claiming that he was Churchill's nephew and should be used as a political bargaining chip) was a British agent sent into France. The novel is mostly concerned with that rather than his training, but I jumped on this quote:
>
>> …Alfred’s pockets were bulging with explosives, which he invariably seemed to carry about with him, much to the terror of his companions, although he swore there was no danger in the habit, since he kept the detonators in a separate pocket. Once a resounding explosion had occurred on his person as the detonator pocket received an unexpected blow. This had demolished his pocket but caused no other damage. Explosions were nothing new in this camp. They were encouraged by Major Young, who promised a pint of beer to any man who could place a pull switch, press switch or self-opening switch on any part of the building, on the furniture or in his car that would detonate before he had discovered its presence.
> 
> I love, _love_ the fact that 'these people were insane and therefore SOE wanted to employ them' is not a stretch at all. Obviously I've no idea if this is completely factual on Churchill's part, but I'm taking it as indicative of the general tone of training. (There is another story in this section about two students who decide to go fishing...with explosives.)
> 
>  **"There were clubs...where women could work behind the bar. In Montmartre."** \- You've got to admire Joan's skilful hinting here. The combination of women/behind the bar/Montmartre is what's telling; a woman working in a club elsewhere might be odd (particularly if she was no relation to the proprietor, and one assumes that Joan has no relatives in France) but Montmartre was known to be the haunt of 'masculine women' and 'les tantes'; the aunts, or gay men. Joan is referring to some very specific clubs.


	7. Elementary Demolition.

**MONTMARTRE  
** **PARIS  
** **1937**

It was nearly three in the morning, and Joan’s face was buried in Persie’s thick, sweet-smelling golden hair as they swayed together on the dancefloor of Le Monocle, the night’s party slowly disintegrating around them.

These were the best moments, when Joan had finished wiping the bar down and Persie had emerged shimmering from the press of bodies to hold her hands out to her, so that they could dance in the blown-apart quiet of the evening’s end. Joan’s hand was at the small of Persie’s back, and she could feel how her hips swayed. It was hot, and Joan’s pomade was dripping down the back of her starched white collar. By now, the band had packed up, but in the corner, lovely, dusky Dominique was touching the keys of the piano and singing under her breath. Her voice was throaty and broken; when she sang out, which she rarely did, it sounded like strong brown liquor tasted.

Persie gave a quiet sigh and straightened up, pressing her forehead against Joan’s. She was minute, shorter even than Joan and with a fine-boned certainty that seemed more precise than fragile. Before she had grown into her own body, the girls at school had called her Tadpole because of her tiny formlessness and the oily gleam of her long, ratty hair. But at fourteen she had adopted a bob and a jaunty walk with her head held high, and had become suddenly beautiful; and she had stayed that way, as if to spite her nay-sayers.

Joan kissed her full on the mouth. Persie kissed her back, while in the background Dominique hummed and stroked chords from the piano, and people said clumsy, drunken goodbyes.

“Girls,” said Lulu, wandering over from the bar with her suit lapels gleaming and a faint, knowing smile gracing her mouth. Her monocle flashed in her hand, and she held it to her eye in wry salute. “My gorgeous girls. Persie, you are some kind of marvel, to be able make Joan neglect her duties. She’s usually so conscientious.”

“She makes me forget I don’t need to work for a living,” Joan said dryly, looking away from Persie but squeezing her hip tighter, making Persie laugh.

“You don’t,” Persie insisted, her voice honeyed. She spoke in French, for Lulu’s benefit. “It’s your pride. You know very well I’ll have you as my, my kept medical student—why, I’ve been offering for years.”

“And I’ve been saying no thanks for years.” 

“You two,” Lulu sighed, in her cool, soft way, wry and smiling. “You make me feel young again.”

“But you _are_ young, Lulu,” Persie murmured in her beseeching way, leaving Joan’s arms to press her lipsticked mouth to Lulu’s cheek. Joan shoved her hands in her trouser pockets and watched them with a smile; Lulu, big and dark and dapper, bowing to kiss Persie’s slim white hand as Persie’s eyelashes fluttered up a storm on her cheeks.

“You flatter an old _gouine_ ,” Lulu drawled unconvincingly, knowing fine well that she was, by virtue of charisma and owning Le Monocle, considered one of the finer of the club’s regular crowd. She wasn't quite handsome—but she was sophisticated, mysterious, and reknowned as a man about town, though it was an image which seemed to amuse her. “And you make a young one jealous,” she added, casting a faint smirk at Joan.

“Me?” Joan asked, laughing. “No. Admiring the view.”

“Both of us?” Lulu said. “Revolutionary. Is that common in England?”

“Not really. Guess why I’m in France.”

“Persie, is there no stopping her?”

“None,” Persie said, catching Joan’s eye. Her voice was hungry, and Joan wet her lips as delicately as she could, tasting Persie’s lipstick clinging faint and plasticky to her own mouth.

“Well; wipe down the tables for me, sort out the chairs, and I’ll let you go. I’ll say goodbye now—” Lulu dropped Persie’s hand and reached for Joan’s. They shook like they were men, Lulu gripping Joan’s arm, talking through it. “Mm, and money—your money’s behind the bar.”

“Tables, got it. Thanks. I’m behind the bar Tuesday through Thursday next week, right?”

“Right. Hey, maybe you could give us some help on Saturday, too? We’re expecting crowds.” Lulu’s voice turned down on this last sentence, her eyebrows arching upwards, and Joan set her mouth harder, understanding. Crowds meant fights; Lulu hadn’t been too keen on employing some bright young English newcomer until one night in 1935 when Joan had shoved herself between two women, each twice Joan’s size, and broken up the fight with nothing but sharp elbows and bloody-minded exhilaration.

Though Persie was stiffening uncomfortably by her side, Joan said, “I can come in Saturday if you need me.”

“Good of you.”

“That’s me,” Joan said, eyebrows up. “Well. Take care. Until the next time we stagger through your door.”

“Oh, Joan, I look forward to it.” In French, preserving Joan’s English vowel made her name sound almost like _Jean_ , and Joan sometimes wondered if that was how Lulu and the other women on the scene knew her.

On impulse, Joan raised Lulu’s fingers up to her lips instead of letting her hand go, ready to give her a wry, inappropriate kiss. Too late, she realised that Lulu’s knuckles were purpled and split, and she paused at the sight of the bruises and the dried blood. Lulu caught the movement, and freed her battered hand to chuck her under the chin.

“None of that. Cheer up,” Lulu said, her voice quiet and serious, before she straightened up and turned her charm back on to sigh extravagantly to Persie: “She’s handsome, your sweetheart, but she’s a cad.”

“I know,” Persie said.

“Very good.” Then she lifted her chin and called out to Dominique, “Sing up, if you’re going to sing!” and breezed past Persie and Joan like she had never been speaking to them.

They stood tight together, Joan with her arm about Persie’s waist, neither particularly wanting to give into the inevitable struggle down the Butte Montmartre back to the house Persie’s father owned, where they lived with Persie’s drunkard brother and a varying number of waifs and strays. Across the dancefloor, Dominique flushed with embarrassment and made the piano choke up with an awkward discord, but Lulu put a broad hand on her back and leaned in to mutter something which made her smile. A moment later, Dominique was shifting up to let Lulu sit beside her on the stool, and they were playing together.

“Did she hurt herself badly, throwing that punch?” Persie asked in English.

“No,” Joan said, tucking Persie’s head beneath her chin. “Bashed up her hand. She’ll be fine.”

“She didn’t need to. Violette was already leaving. She knew she wasn’t wanted—why, there was no _need_.”

“I think there was a lot of need for Lulu. You know what she thinks of the Fascists.”

“Apparently she thinks they’re targets.” Persie’s voice was sad and tipsy, muffled in Joan’s jacket shoulder. Joan could feel her breath through the fabric when she exhaled.

“She thinks they’re rats,” she replied, her voice calm and quiet, her thumb rubbing small circles into the indent above Persie’s hipbone.

“What do you think?”

“I think I’m happy that Lulu’s got a nasty right hook.”

“Are you? Oh, no, don’t answer, let’s not. I wish people wouldn’t bring politics into everything. Particularly not into nightclubs—I mean, for heaven’s sake.”

“I’ve got tables to buff.”

“Stay a bit. I feel so—so end-of-the-party. Don’t you?”

Joan sighed a long sigh, breathing in the smell of Persie’s hair again, because something about that particular warm floral scent spoke of a life made out of beginnings and beginnings and beginnings until the final end, which was far away.

“It’s not that I like the Fascists,” Persie remarked. “Just that Violette’s fine when she doesn’t air her silly opinions about the whole mess. Don’t you like her?”

Joan knew that for a few strange, uneasy months in 1936 when she and Persie had agreed to live as friends and explore the clubs as single girls, Violette had been one of Persie’s conquests. “We’re not really friends.” 

Persie sighed, and Joan sighed; it didn’t matter, maybe. Persie’s head was warm on Joan’s shoulder, her fingers sneaking under Joan’s jacket, then up to untuck her crisp white shirt from the back of her trousers. “Bit indiscreet,” Joan said after a few moments of Persie stroking along the skin above her waistband. She was grinning into Persie’s hair. “Come on, are you mad? Not here.”

“There’s no one watching,” said Persie, and slipped her thumb down the back of Joan’s trousers, to the cleft of her arse, while Joan clenched and unclenched a fistful of gold silk at Persie’s hip.

* * *

_If only I’d frequented jazz clubs, we might have met each other much earlier._

Joan found herself staring at the sleeping shape of Sherlock’s shoulders and back, just inches away from her. Like she had stared at her each night since Sherlock had cornered her in that empty room and broken open the past.

She imagined Sherlock in gold silk, with Lulu bowing down to her. Sherlock with her velvety hair bobbed to a short burst of curls about her face or swept up in an elegant chignon, Sherlock in dark lipstick, Sherlock drinking something clear and strong. The smell of female sweat and hard liquor and Sherlock’s hips moving snakelike under shifting silk, the lines of her stocking-tops and suspender belt legible when her dress was pulled tight. Sherlock laughing into Joan’s ear, shouting her usual absurd brilliance over the noise of the band. _Suitcase—boom—how’s your murdered man?_ Sherlock drunk at the end of the night, and Joan getting an armful of her, slippery warm silk and skin pressed up against Joan’s shirt front or, hell, perhaps Sherlock wouldn’t go for that, perhaps she would cut and oil her hair like Joan had, and then stand with her long limbs outlined in a stark black suit. Would it have mattered? No. God. No.

But where had Sherlock been in 1937? The Paris Conservatoire? Joan tried to think of it, and tried to imagine what Sherlock would have been doing. What instrument she played. What she had looked like. Hair long? Short? Had she ever dyed it? Women of Sherlock’s class might dye their hair if they fancied, and be seen as just eccentric. Did she wear evening dresses at all, or heels? Had she been one of those studious girls Joan had sometimes aped, with their severe dark skirts and their gone-cold good looks, eyes distant and visionary all at once? Joan could picture Sherlock gliding through the streets of Paris like that, a dark ghost, her dusty jacket pinching her unfed waist as she visibly considered the unreal. And yet there was a wildness in Sherlock that didn’t quite lend itself to being devoted to eternal study; a desire to grab hold of the world and shake out its secrets. A similar wildness, perhaps, to the kind which had propelled clever, dry, _uppity_ Joan Watson, one of eight women studying medicine at the Sorbonne that year, out into Montmartre at night.

Joan thought of Sherlock’s voice, and how sometimes, she was sure it reminded her of someone else’s, someone she couldn’t think of, couldn’t put a face to. But she couldn’t have met her then, could she? Sherlock hadn’t been hinting at anything when she’d said _if only I’d frequented jazz clubs_. That was absurd.

Could Joan have possibly not noticed her, and shoved a drink across to her, not properly catching her pale eyes and wild curls in the press of bodies and the burble of music? Could their hands have touched as Sherlock poured hot, damp coins into her palm? Could she have wiped the greasy smear of Sherlock’s lipstick from the rim of a glass?

No, no; no, of course not.

Joan rolled onto her back, threw an arm over her eyes. God, she’d been so young, and so stupid, and—the thought came with a jerk in her chest, a kind of wry sadness—and she wasn’t so different now, no matter how she had tried. But she was different all the same, and so was everything else.

Now, Le Monocle must be empty and still, one more monument to a fleeting past. And where were they, Lulu and Dominique and Persie, and every other face which had come and gone through those secret doorways, stumbling and laughing?

(“I really don’t think they’re still there,” Sally had said, and quite rightly. Joan had known logically that that life couldn’t survive under Occupation. But somehow, now that she was allowing the memories to play back in her mind, and letting herself give vague shape to what had happened there, now that she was thinking about it again—for all the perfect, glittering detail, it had never seemed more lost.)

The bed beside her creaked. Joan froze, feeling caught-out in her own thoughts. She stayed still, her arm over her eyes, as Sherlock’s bedsprings complained again. Then there came the whisper of bare feet on the floorboards.

“I know you’re awake,” Sherlock murmured. Her voice stirred the darkness. “Want to do something more fun than lie there?”

Joan swallowed down everything her imagination could throw at her, and pushed down her arm, thinking _yes, no_ —but even the most desperate part of her was distracted by the summer moonlight glinting off what Sherlock had in her hand.

Slowly, leaving Paris behind on her pillow, Joan sat up.

“Is that a pull switch?” she asked.

Sherlock looked at it thoughtfully, as if only just now considering the possibility, and then hummed, “It does seem to be, doesn’t it?” Joan clamped her hand over a laugh, then looked around to check that Molly and Sally hadn’t woken up. “Don’t worry, they’re fast asleep.”

“You’re insane.”

“Carter threw down the gauntlet.”

“Yes, and Carter’s—”

“Mad,” said Sherlock, a smile in her voice. “We established the other day.”

“Glad you were listening,” said Joan, and pushed her covers back, but the mention of _the other day_ had made her think, again, of their conversation in the closed-up room. _If only I had frequented jazz clubs_...like Sherlock wished she’d been there. Or like Sherlock knew what sort of clubs she was talking about.

But Sherlock was creeping towards the door in dressing gown and pajamas, with the pull switch clutched in her hand, so Joan shook her head to clear it and slipped out of bed, following her out into the corridor. “We’ll get put on a charge for this if we get caught,” she warned her.

“Was that a pun?”

“No. And he said blow the _cap_. Not detonate any actual charges. If you’re planning on demolishing a wall, I don’t think I can let you do that.”

“Could you stop me?”

“Yes.”

“Just the cap, I promise. Come along.”

They snuck through the darkened corridors of the house, Joan somehow failing to feel completely absurd. If anything, it seemed natural to be slipping through the dark on Sherlock’s tail, holding her breath in the dusty silence and straining her ears to hear anything but the wind wailing around the outer walls.

Perhaps it had been stupid to think of Sherlock lounging in a suit or silk at the edge of a dancefloor, when she so much preferred to be sneaking around places she wasn’t supposed to be. But then again, in 1937, none of them were _supposed to be_ in Le Monocle, nor smoking in the discreet cafe opposite the Tuileries with the other self-made English exiles, nor crashing to bed with hair oil smearing the pillow and Persie’s tiny, slender fingers plucking open Joan’s shirt buttons one at a time with a musical deftness.

Joan kept her eyes on Sherlock as she slipped between the shadows, and wondered if that kind of connection, that Persie-and-Joan thing, could happen outside of those secret spaces. Of course, the first time she had kissed Persie, they had been in their dormitory at school, with no jazz hooting and moaning in the background and no Lulu lounging at the side of a dancefloor to encourage them. Still, only in Paris, she felt, had the shape of their relationship resolved into something which made sense. She wondered about this, but she asked, “Where are we going?”

“Shh.”

Barefoot, they crept onwards, until Sherlock came to a stop and leaned her ear against a door, then slowly turned the knob and pushed it inwards with a confident creak.

“ _Sherl_ —”

“Better to make a loud noise like we’re supposed to be here than a quiet noise like we’re not,” Sherlock said calmly, and flicked on the light.

Joan blinked in the stuttering glare, shutting the door behind her. A desk occupied most of the room, piled high with paper and administrative debris, and with a strange black and green telephone sitting atop it, just like the one she had seen in Harding’s office.

“If this is Bannager’s—”

“Of course not.”

“That just means it’s Carter’s, doesn’t it.”

“I suppose it does.”

“Right. We’re going to try setting a trap in Carter’s office. Subtle.”

“You think Carter appreciates subtlety?”

“I know you don’t.”

“Get the desk drawers.”

Sherlock was fussing with the pull switch, yanking out the safety pin and plucking a roll of thread from her dressing gown pocket. Joan watched her fingers spin through the motions of creating a tripwire. “How are you going to set it?” she asked.

“Top drawer. He opens it every morning, it’s where he keeps his black market biscuits. I suppose they make the black market coffee taste better.”

“I’m not going to ask. Look, hang on,” she said. “Give me that. There are better ways, Sherlock.”

Sherlock stared at her, then sniffed, stepping back slightly and watching with a critical eye. Joan licked her lips and took the pull switch, murmuring, “First of all, from now on, we’re going to try pulling out the safety pin _after_ the thing’s bloody set, alright?”

“It’s not a grenade. Nothing’s going to go off unless the release pin is pulled.”

“Let’s just, you know, respect things that explode.”

“Now who sounds like Carter?”

“ _Shut up_ ,” Joan insisted, laughing as she put the pull switch on top of the desk and snapped off the flimsy tripwire Sherlock had created. “You’ve got good hands for delicate work; take that thread and plait three bits of it together. I’d say it’s going to have to be a meter and a half to start with.” Then she glanced up, feeling an idea spark in the back of her brain, and started casting around for a drawing pin—only to see Sherlock staring down at a blank notepad on the desk, ignoring the reel of thread Joan had charged her with.

“What is it?” Joan asked.

“Nothing,” said Sherlock, even though she was ripping the top page off, and holding it up to the light, her face brightened by some passing thought. Then the expression was gone; she tucked the page into her dressing gown pocket and shrugged. “Nothing yet. Drawing pins are to your right.”

“I—how did you—never mind,” Joan said, reaching for the little case of brassy tacks and shoving one into the inside of the desk drawer. She twisted it upwards, so it was stuck firmly in the wood. “There. Cheap desk, thank God.”

“Thank God? You’ve become very invested very quickly.”

Yes, she had, Joan thought, a little grimly, not really thinking about the pull switch. There didn’t seem to be much point in replying to that comment aloud; instead she asked, “What was that you just picked up?” as she crouched to pull out the second drawer and give it the same drawing pin treatment, this time adding more than one. She took the reel of thread off the desk and started lashing the pull switch to the inside of the second drawer via the twisted sticks of the pins, trying to ensure that the body of the device would remain more or less still while the release pin was pulled.

“Captain Carter’s in the habit of recording his ’phone calls,” Sherlock said, which was no explanation at all. Joan rolled her eyes, twisting a pin a little more roughly than necessary as she secured the pull switch.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes. And he’s just got some very strange, irritating orders.”

“Wrote that down, did he?”

“Oh, look at the fireplace. He might as well have.”

Joan looked up from her half-set trap to stare at the fireplace. It stared back at her, grey and ashy and entirely unrevelatory. “Fireplace, right. All becomes clear. Are you just terminally nosy?”

“I can’t help but see what’s obvious.”

“What’s obvious to _you_.”

“Yes? That’s all I can comment on. Here.” Joan looked up; Sherlock was holding out a long plaited length of thread. It glinted on her fingers, and for a moment Joan felt dreadful that she had been imagining her all silk-slippery and pressed against her.

“Thanks,” Joan said, smiling through it and taking the makeshift tripwire from Sherlock’s hands, trying not to touch her skin. “So there’s nothing nosy about you, is there?”

“Nothing,” Sherlock confirmed, and leaned in closer to watch Joan fix the tripwire to the release pin, then prop the top drawer up atop the first, not yet putting it back in its proper place. She looped the tripwire around the back of the shelf meant to separate the two drawers, then over the back of the top drawer, and fixed it to the pin sticking out of its inside. Finally, feeling like she hadn’t breathed in a year, she put the top drawer back where it was supposed to be.

“Too much slack in the tripwire,” Sherlock pointed out. Joan nodded.

“Over to you, I think.”

Sherlock’s eyebrows flickered upwards as she shrugged her agreement, then crouched and pulled out the second drawer by a few inches with a calm delicacy which made Joan wonder, not for the first time since Sherlock had mentioned the Conservatoire de Paris, what on earth she played, and whether Joan would ever see her do it.

Sherlock slipped her right hand inside the half-opened lower drawer, using the left to keep the drawer itself steady. Then the lines of her face tensed even as all sight seemed to leave her eyes. And Joan might have been struck by how she had been imagining Sherlock wearing just such an expression of visionary concentration as she melted through Paris five years ago, had she not been stuck to the present moment seemingly by the sheer, sudden force of her own heartbeat.

Sherlock tied the knot one-handed, unable to see what she was doing with her fingers, and Joan watched her blank pale eyes, feeling time stretch and something, some final wall of denial, crumble. It hurt a little.

Seconds later, Sherlock closed the drawer and sat back, and then finally allowed herself a wild grin, her face suddenly flickering back to life. Again, Joan smiled through a wash of want and guilt. “Next time,” she said. “Safety pin.”

“Yes,” said Sherlock, and leaned in to close the gap between their mouths; except she didn’t. She leaned forwards to get to her feet, leaving Joan kneeling on the floorboards with her eyes screwed shut, fists clenched uselessly for a second until she could bring herself to do the same.

Do something, she thought. Do anything. Resign yourself now and you’ll never know what she knows, or what she thinks.

“Sherlock,” she said, finally standing up, and hearing her voice come out heavy and resigned. “Let’s—can we talk?”

“We are talking.”

“Right. Yes. Thanks. I mean, can we talk about what I said the other day?”

“About your aborted medical career?”

“About the clubs.”

“Ah.”

Careful now. Joan wet her lips and kept her voice as bland as possible.“I know we were having a laugh, but I would appreciate it if you could—”

“Were we?” Sherlock asked, blinking and looking suddenly like she had taken a wrong turn. Joan stared helplessly at her.

“Were we what?”

“‘Having a laugh’.”

“We—” Joan pinched in her lips for a moment, and kept resolutely calm. “Just don’t mouth off about it. Please.”

“You don’t trust me.”

“That’s not what I said, actually. Come on, we need to move.”

“I can’t imagine why I’d _mouth off_ about—”

“Jesus, Sherlock,” Joan said. “Can you just take it at face value that I’m asking that you not do something, not because I think you would but because it would be _really_ not good for me if by some accident you _did_?”

Sherlock stared at her, her eyes wide rings of grey. “Yes,” she said finally. “Alright.”

“Thank you.”

“No.”

“What?”

“No, don’t thank me,” Sherlock said. “It’s fine. I simply didn’t realise you were—that is, it’s fine.”

The air between them seemed warm, and possessed of some magnetic quality, pulling them together. But Sherlock broke free to switch off the light and open the door. The dark didn’t help as they crept back to their room. And after they settled back down in the beds they had let go cold, Joan listened with a kind of awful rapture to Sherlock’s breathing and tried to dispel the ridiculous idea that Sherlock might just be listening to hers.

* * *

“Holmes!” The bathroom tiles—white running to grey, and yellowed about the skirting board—amplified all noise, so that it seemed like a whole army of Sally Donovans were pounding at the door rather than just one. Sherlock ignored her all the same. “Holmes! Sherlock!”

The bathroom was thick with leftover steam; they were supposed to use the severe-looking shower block for quick washes, but it was so cold and miserable that no one reprimanded them for rushing off to the second-floor bathroom reserved for female use, and was usually left locked and lightless. Molly had been in before, hurriedly sluicing off the coating of dirt she had acquired on one of Bannager's beloved 6 AM runs, so the whole room smelt uncomfortably of other people's ablutions. Sherlock minded this even less than Sally's yelling and knocking—but the dampness was making the edges of the paper she was scrutinising curl up, and _that_ , she found irritating. Alarming, even. If the paper should get too wet and lose its impressions before she could make them out—

She wouldn't think about it. Couldn't, now that she had fixed the paper in her mind and needed to understand what had been scrawled on the page above it.

It was the scrap she had torn from Carter's notebook the night before. She had it pressed against the mirror—fingers stretched out to pin both top and bottom as best she could—and was shading over it gently with the side of a sharp pencil, her breath coming evenly.

Words were appearing, picked out in white; slight indents which had been pressed in by a pen nib, and now remained untouched by the pencil. She wasn't going to read them. Not until she had the whole thing. Or, she thought, her mind might spontaneously turn cannibal and eat itself alive with speculation before she had all the facts.

Finally the paper was all shaded grey save for the faint ghosts of words. She took a deep breath—

“Sherlock!”

“What?”

—and refocused on her own reflection behind the stolen page, scowling at it in lieu of being able to scowl at Sally, whose voice was an exasperated huff: “Oh, for—you know, I thought you'd fainted! Can't you answer when someone's calling you?”

Toying idly with the idea of responding, Sherlock glanced down at the sink and its traces of vomit. She had thrown up again prior to pushing the paper up against the mirror and taking her pencil to it. 

She was beginning to suspect that her fits of nausea were less to do, now, with cutting down on the pills, and more to do with how hungry the whole mess seemed to make her; she had been eating more, but her stomach was never totally happy with it, especially not after the kind of strenuous exercise Bannager liked to put them through, urging them onwards and making vague, threatening allusions to a much sterner trek at the very end of the month.

“What are you doing in there?”

Sherlock wondered which answer Sally would most prefer: spying on a superior’s personal notes, or failing to ease herself off a cocktail of medicines. Either one was tempting— _see what she makes of the truth_ —but ultimately unwise. Instead of replying, Sherlock bent her head low and caught the stream of water from the tap in her mouth, gulping it down sideways and soaking a few whirls of hair, splattering her collar, then straightening up. She had every hope that she would keep it down, which meant that she couldn't be sure. Hope!—hoping was something people did when they weren't in control. And without the pills, every act was now an act of hope. An action thrown into the void, whose repercussions were impossible to predict before they arrived to wreak havoc.

She stowed the piece of paper in her uniform pocket and unlocked the door.

“It's perfectly alright, Sally,” she said brightly, turning on a false smile. “You know, if you just want to ask ‘still a drug addict, Holmes?’ I really won’t take offence.”

Sally shook her head and slipped into the bathroom; the last thing Sherlock heard before the door closed behind was her saying, “ _And_ you've left the tap running—”

Sherlock's mouth twisted upwards in a terrible smile.

“She's just worried about you, you know,” said Joan, who had been watching the entire exchange from where she was lounging against the wall, arms folded. She was in battle dress without the jacket, for once wearing her shirt and tie; a concession to the baking weather which had come upon them like a wall of dry dust. She kept talking about cutting her hair because of it, though it was already shorter than any of the other women’s.

“So are you,” Sherlock said, sounding coolly accusatory and for a moment not walking closer.

“Yes,” Joan said, sighing and pushing herself away from the wall, and rather cutting short Sherlock's plans to say something like so _why else have you followed me to the WC_ or perhaps, if she felt daring, _do you often follow women to WC for reasons other than being worried for them, then?_ “But not how you think, actually.”

Still slightly indignant about Joan's positive answer, Sherlock said, “Oh? How do I think you worry about me?”

—though she knew, of course; was well-acquainted with the fear that Joan might, despite her startling promises to remain her friend, start to consider her too much effort, impractical, senseless, helpless—in need of being often overruled, controlled, cautioned.

But Joan was already shaking her head, smiling: “Doesn’t matter. It's okay, Sherlock. Don't worry about it. Look, er, you know last night...”

Sherlock, who had just stepped in the direction of breakfast, stopped and looked at Joan with some surprise—an unintentionally hungry variety of surprise. “Yes?”

Skipping her Nembutal entirely always left her drifting in a grey, shifting place between sleep and waking when she stopped moving and gave the chemical imbalance time to catch up with her. Last night, upon thudding down onto her mattress, she had felt her mind start to diffuse uneasily, spiralling out of her control while her head started to pound from fatigue, a dull thumping above her closed eyes. She had ended up thinking—over and over, like going through doorway after glittering doorway—of Paris, Joan’s Paris.

Of course, she had long been vaguely conscious of the existence of clubs in which women might , amongst other things, bartend. _Where women could work behind the bar_ —for goodness’ sake. Even the euphemism was somehow intriguing, suggesting a twilight world which Sherlock couldn’t—quite—grasp, not in the detail she wanted. And gone, now, of course. Just barely visible in what Joan didn’t say, almost tangible in how she tied her tie and sometimes pushed her hair backwards with her fingertips—thoughtfully, half-watching herself in the mirror, blue eyes watching events unfold in a different time—pushing it behind her ears so it looked shorter than it was. 

She wanted Joan to bring up Paris—was, for a second, breathless with the idea that she might—was unable to believe her luck.

Instead, Joan said, “Reckon Carter's found the trap yet?”

And it was hard to be disappointed, because Joan looked so staggeringly, wickedly happy. Sherlock blinked, then finally met her glee with a slight, smug smile, snapping back to Inverness-shire in 1942, and leaving a vague, illusory 1937 where it belonged.

“I hope so,” she said, with some satisfaction. “In fact, we ought to hurry to breakfast before someone else takes the credit.” She thought of the page burning in her pocket, and was satisfied, for the moment, with letting Paris lie. Better to walk on, and feel Joan Watson—the present, current version—fall into step with her, matching her rhythm so casually it was thrilling. “Something to show you, too.”

“Oh?”

“Breakfast first.”

“What happened to—” Joan's tone was rich was laughter, but she broke off abruptly and unnaturally. Sherlock, walking beside her, gave her a curious look.

“What?”

“No, nothing.”

Sherlock realised, with a sudden rush of confusion which nearly swamped her, that Joan had been about to say _what happened to ‘I don't eat’?_ and had cut herself off upon realising the answer to her own question. ‘I don’t eat’ had—at least for the moment—gone the way of her pills.

Because her normal response to confusion was anger, it wasn’t until she was setting her plate and mug down on one of the long tables set out in the faded dining room—now as drabbed-down and austere as any NAAFI canteen—that Sherlock realised she was grateful that Joan had stopped herself from bringing it up.

She polished off her toast with a single-minded certainty—shoving down her vague disgust at the idea of being watched as she ate—and left the rest, _hungry_ not necessarily meaning much when her preferred baseline was nothing. She was glad, however, to expunge the sour taste of sick from her mouth.

“Done?” Joan asked, still half way through her own breakfast.

In answer, Sherlock leaned back and pulled the shaded-over page from her pocket, handing it to Joan. She watched with a quiet, held-tight eagerness as Joan unfolded it, and rehearsed its words in her head:

1732 / STS 5 / OP SINNERMAN  
TRAINING NOTES (AGENTS - PROFESSOR) TO BE SENT TO STS 5 ASAP  
TO TRAVEL STRICTLY BY RIDER WITH APT COVER 

———

~~RB SHOWED APTITUDE BUT UNLIKELY  
SINNERMAN? GOD KNOWS~~

“What do you think?” Sherlock asked finally, after she judged that Joan’s brow was as furrowed as it was going to get.

“Well,” said Joan, “I am…fairly sure we’re both now criminals. Is this what you took from Carter’s room last night?”

“Of course. Above the line are his notes on the actual conversation, probably a memory aid, and below the line are his own thoughts on the matter. I assume he alarmed himself, because he struck them out and burned the original.”

“What does it mean?” Joan asked. Sherlock could have crowed, and took a victorious gulp of acidic tea to mask her wild, satisfied grin.

“It _means_ ,” she said, unable to stop the stirrings of glee in her tone, “that Carter’s been ordered to relinquish his notes on a certain group of men whom he trained and who are now in France. The order comes from someone involved in something called Operation Sinnerman, the details of which Carter isn’t entirely familiar with. Notes on how they took to explosives, I’d say, considering Carter’s metier.”

“What? Sherlock—” Joan stared at her, and then said, “Okay, go on.”

Sherlock smirked, long and pleased. “Something’s been blown up, and they’re trying to identify the likely character of the person who did it. What I like, though, is the rider. _Apt cover_. He needs a story to tell if someone asks him what he’s doing, ferrying these documents around. Whoever called Carter doesn’t want to anyone to know he’s got his hands on the notes.”

Joan shook her head slowly. “Right, okay, I think you’ve missed the bit where these people are—you know, they do this for a living.”

“So do we.”

“Not yet, actually. And this is—I don’t even know the official name for this kind of offence.”

“Good heavens,” said Sherlock, blowing on her tea and sending ripples flowing across the surface. Her eyebrows arched for a moment, before collapsing under the weight of her own sarcasm: “ _Must_ be bad.”

Molly and Sally were gliding closer, putting down their plates and mugs, in close-knit conversation of their own. Sally was talking in a low voice, while Molly listened urgently, her eyes wide and startlingly clear. Across the bowed heads of the canteen, Sherlock could see that Carter had come in. He was moving through the rows, occasionally stopping to make some clench-jawed demand of one of the men. His face was thunderous, but then it always was. Sherlock saw all of this out of the corner of her eye, seemed to pick it up from disturbances in the atmosphere: all her conscious attention was focused on Joan.

Finally, Joan gave one breath of laughter and shook her head. “Fine. Okay. We’re reading officers’ communications now. What’s this for? You think there’s some kind of bigger picture, don’t you?”

Did she? Well: yes. But as to details… “Haven’t the faintest,” Sherlock hummed, suddenly straightening up. “Just nice to know, isn’t it?” Then she raised her voice slightly, unfolding it out of the private murmur she had been keeping for Joan: “Oh, _cave_ , Carter’s discovered the gunpowder plot. Really quite disappointed it took him this long.”

“Oh, Christ,” Joan muttered, shaking her head and seizing her tea as if ready to drown herself in it.

Molly blinked at them both, hash brown hovering between her mouth and her plate. “Sorry, what was that, Sherlock?” she asked politely. Sally was just looking skeptical, swirling her tea in her mug.

Apparently taking it upon herself to translate, Joan sighed, “Latin,” stabbing in earnest at her plate. “ _Cave_. It’s how the idle rich say _watch out_.”

“I meant the gunpowder plot bit, actually.”

But Carter, bulldozing along the rows of tables, had begun to advance in their direction.

“Holmes!”

“Good morning, sir,” Sherlock said, her voice booming deep and smug, feeling how her smile crinkled her face. Carter narrowed his eyes at her. She raised her eyebrows in her politest, most brittle mask of innocence, and he looked at her all the harder.

“Alright, m’girl,” he said. She prickled and hid it. “Unless you can tell me the exact setup of the trap, all bets are off. Who knows what you’d take credit for otherwise.”

“I would never,” Sherlock said, faux-innocence blooming in proportion to her annoyance. “In fact, I can tell you right now that the trap was set up with the switch in the lower drawer and the tripwire slung around the back of the upper drawer, then attached to the interior via drawing pins.” A beat. “And that it was Watson’s idea, chiefly.” She caught Joan’s eye, and toasted her with the last of her tea.

Joan gave her a look which was totally flat and promised her instant demise if this should go pear-shaped, and which produced in Sherlock an inexplicable and rather alarming thrill of excitement. Carter, for his part, turned his flashing, intent gaze on Joan, and she cleared her throat. “Joint effort, sir,” she said.

“Well,” Carter said, slowly leaning back and shaking his head. “Women and bombs.”

Sherlock carefully paced her grin so that it didn’t come too sharp or too smug as it spread over her face, but doubted she was succeeding. Joan nearly slumped with relief. She certainly put down her cutlery, flicking Sherlock another murderous gaze out of the corner of her eyes, to which Sherlock gave only a gracious nod. Her mouth was dry, she found, and she reached for her mug before she remembered that she had finished her tea already.

“Yes,” said Joan. “Women and bombs. So, er...about those pints.”

“Hold your horses, ladies,” said Carter warningly. “We’d have to go down to the pub in the village.”

“Fine by me,” Joan said, raising her eyebrows—Paris, 1937, suddenly crackled to life in the careless bravado in her words, and she must have heard it too because she paused, apparently startled by her own easy insouciance. Sherlock heard the silence, and picked up the thread of the argument.

“We’ll chaperone you,” she said magnanimously. “Sir.”

For a moment, Carter’s gaze was cold. Sherlock raised her chin, feeling her own expression freeze; if chilliness was the game, she wasn’t going to lose. But then his eyes crackled with amusement— not altogether reassuring. “You ought to watch your tongue, Aircraftwoman.”

“That would be difficult without a mirror, Captain,” she said, not losing her own iciness—and then snapping on an abrupt cheeriness as she looked across the table. _Look, I can do that too_. “Molly, Sally, you’ll come, won’t you? Safety in numbers, and so on. Between the kitchen staff and the drivers I expect we could flood the place with women if we tried.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the muscles of Joan’s throat work. Sherlock flexed her fingers, just once, and kept her gaze on Molly and Sally.

“I...no,” Sally was saying, shaking her head and retreating, with a certain skeptical alarm, back inside her careful shell. “Don’t see the appeal of pubs.”

“I’d like to go,” Molly offered, looking a little defiant.

“Hold up, hold up,” Carter said. Sherlock looked lazily back at him, keeping her face slack and bored. “ _Hold up_. I seem to remember that I offered a single pint to whoever could detonate a percussion cap around the house, and now it’s a ladies’ day trip.”

“Molly and Sally—when she gives in and decides to come after all—will buy their own drinks,” Sherlock said smoothly. “You’ll buy a pint each for Joan and me. Quite simple.”

“A half pint each.”

“Oh, _well_ ,” Sherlock sighed, glancing boredly at her fingernails. “If we’re changing the rules now, sir, you may as well make mine a gin and lemon.”

“I’ll have anything that’s neat and strong, sir,” said Joan helpfully, and Sherlock almost flushed with pleasure at having someone take her side, then felt disgusted with herself.

Carter stood there narrowing his eyes at them, dark and harried with his fists clenched, and then he broke out into laughter. Great, booming bells of it, breaking above the low background burble of morning chatter. “Women and bombs! Typical. Fine. A pint each, at the end of the month. And Watson?”

“Yessir?”

“Nice one. Next time, though, don’t trust thread. You were lucky.”

“I was,” Joan agreed, firm and inscrutable; and when Carter had left, she caught Sherlock’s eye, and both of them looked away quickly. It didn't disguise, and couldn't help, how Sherlock felt the bench start to shake with Joan's laughter; and how she, too, was starting to chuckle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, dearest darlings, for reading! Next chapter will be Monday, August 19th. On with the notes, which today include quite a few pictures of historical lesbians. You're welcome.
> 
>  **"Le Monocle"** \- Le Monocle was a real, notorious lesbian club in Montmartre which had its heyday in the 20s and 30s before finally closing in the early 40s. Butch Parisian lesbians of the time often wore monocles and white carnations in their button holes, hence the name. [Here](http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4058/4676641232_0837363ef0_z.jpg) is a truly fantastic photograph of its patrons. For what it's worth, I'm picturing Dominique as the black woman in the pale dress with the wicked smile.
> 
>  **"Lulu"** \- Lulu de Montparnasse was the owner of Le Monocle, but I'm making up her character entirely here and can't claim any kind of biographical accuracy beyond the fact that...her name was Lulu, she owned a lesbian club, she looked [like this](http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/photographs/brassai-au-monocle-avec-lulu-de-montparnasse-5600336-details.aspx). Click around; she's behind the bar, I think, and she may just be in the other picture as well. (It took me a lot of detective work to come to this conclusion).
> 
>  **"an old _gouine_ "** \- 'Gouine' is (I think/hope) equivalent to 'dyke'.
> 
>  **"Violette"** \- Joan and Persie may just be talking about Violette Morris, a famous French athlete and butch lesbian, who would come to be known as the Hyena of the Gestapo for the part she played in fighting the Resistance. Some people have suggested that she's the butch partner in this [famous photograph](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lv0f36MGD21qdy7vgo1_1280.jpg) taken at Le Monocle. I'm not entirely sure, because her nose and face shape look different to me in confirmed photographs of her like [this one](http://theselvedgeyard.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/veloce-jun09e.jpg?w=600&h=560). Still, see what you think. (Something about the dreamy look in the femme lady's eyes there, by the way, influenced my characterisation of Persie).
> 
>  **"how hungry the whole mess seemed to make her"** \- As amphetamines reduce the appetite, coming off them has the opposite effect, which is what Sherlock's dealing with here.
> 
>  **"We’d have to go down to the pub in the village."** \- Ooh, scandal. At the time, women in pubs were often seen as 'loose', unless chaperoned by a male friend, and sometimes even then. Different pubs had different reputations, too, of course, so in some cases it would just be seen as ridiculous and strange for a woman to trespass on a space which was so obviously male. I'm picturing the pub Carter's suggesting as very rural, quiet, tight-knight in terms of its regulars, and not exactly the sort of place expecting to be descended upon by a group of military women.


	8. Of Broken Teeth.

They were coming to the end of their month at Swordland Lodge and Sherlock had discovered, or remembered, the joy of landing a punch.

“Jesus,” Joan wheezed, doubled over with her hands on her knees and her breath knocked from her. “Learn that at the Conservatoire de Paris, did you?”

Sherlock, a little breathless herself, said, “No, that was from a Swiss convent,” and accidentally made Joan choke laughing before she straightened up, wiped her mouth, grinned. Her face was flushed, bright, very pink, and Sherlock’s heart was rioting in her chest, sending her blood thudding through her.

“Madwoman,” Joan said. “Right. Fairbanks didn’t see, I’ll forgive you. Come on.”

Joan was standing with her feet planted apart, hunkered down low, her hair falling in golden disarray across her forehead. Sherlock rocked on the balls of her feet, slowing her breath, and stilled, waited, for so long that Joan repeated, still a little winded, still a little giggly, “Come _on_ —”

And then Sherlock darted forwards, their bodies connecting with a hard smack of muscle against muscle.

With the possible exception of Carter’s more advanced tutorials on explosives, close combat was, to Sherlock, the most exciting part of training at Swordland Lodge. It covered any sort of fighting not done with a firearm—whether with a knife or bare fists, or elbows, or knees—and was masterminded by Captain Fairbanks, a stringy, sandy-haired man with a lazy aristocratic ripple to his buttery Scottish voice who didn’t look like a killer. Upon their introduction he had taken Sherlock, Joan, Molly and Sally aside, and said, “Listen, will you? None of those men want to land a hit on you. I’m ordering you four, right now, to make them regret every last bit of chivalric hesitation.”

Sherlock rather enjoyed him.

Fairbanks wrinkled his nose at Bannager’s gruff and staid use of the phrase close combat. “Regrettably, the Major wasn’t born to be an irregular,” he confided to them early in the course, lazily demonstrating how to flip a knife from one hand to the other and drive upwards in the same movement. Sherlock watched the knife and not his face. “ _Close combat_ , he says. I find myself inclined to term it _silent killing_ , gentlemen. Ladies. Your aim is to end the fight as quickly as possible, and end it in your favour.” Then Sherlock had finally glanced away from the spinning blade, and Fairbanks had cried: “Holmes, you were doing so well until you looked away! Better than all these other idiots who think a chap with a knife in his hand is going to say anything worth hearing. Get those charming all-seeing eyes up here and see if you can get me to lose my grip on it.”

She was somewhat less fond of his habit of calling her charming and making reference to her eyes. And yet he trusted her with a knife. There was such thing as bearing with hardship.

Silent killing couldn’t very well be practiced in its full form, so close combat was what they worked on, here in the huge and echoing barn which smelt leathery and agricultural—filling it with grunts of pain and the smack of skin on skin.

Fairbanks would call out when they were dead. Often. You’re in a hold, Holmes, you might as well say your prayers. Anderson, he’s got a hand free; you kicked the bucket five seconds ago. Watch out, Watson, in that position he could have you snapped in half if he were competent—or angry.

Or, as now, coming a second after a loud thud which echoed through Sherlock’s whole body, a distant burst of pain and a reeling view of the rafters, as Sherlock found herself on her back on the ground:

“Very nice, Watson. Holmes won’t be getting up from that one.”

 _Bloody_ —Sherlock grimaced and blinked herself back to reality, pushing herself up into a sitting position. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped as she rolled her neck and stood up; brushing down her lapels and flicking her eyes up to where Joan was standing with her hands behind her back, looking stridently unapologetic. “She knocked me over, that’s all.”

“And the second you’re on your back, you’re as good as dead,” Fairbanks said. Joan was grinning to herself, blue eyes fixed innocently on the rafters of the old barn. Sherlock—whose pride had been the main casualty—fought the urge to roll her eyes, though there was something slightly amusing about the sheer amount of scrubbed-clean innocence Joan could project while utterly failing to keep a straight face about it. The soft, boyish lines of her face were delightfully, misleadingly open.

“Come on now, ladies,” said Fairbanks, clapping his hands. “Don’t just stand there giggling at each other, try again!”

Sherlock licked her lips and straightened the cuffs of her BD jacket with sharp, gruff movements, remarking,“I was informed that the afterlife held St Peter, not Captain Fairbanks.”

“I’m not part of the _heavenly_ convoy, put it that way. I may have left a pitchfork back at my digs, however.”

“Don’t stall,” said Joan, innocence flickering out and vanishing as her eyes narrowed and her smile widened, suddenly looking very far from the heavenly convoy herself.

Not even Sherlock could say with any certainty which of them lunged for the other first, but then they had their hands on each other’s bodies, striking and ducking and darting in and out of each other’s reach. There were no particular rules, and no particular style or form was adhered to; Fairbanks couldn’t say the words _Queensbury rules_ without hacking up a lung laughing, and Sherlock firmly agreed with him.

As for Joan—Joan liked to win.

Which meant that Sherlock could stagger and leave herself wide open, knowing Joan wouldn’t miss it—then snatch Joan’s wrist as she drove for a punch to Sherlock’s jaw, and drag her off balance. Because Joan never gave up a chance when she saw one.

Joan’s jaw smacked off Sherlock’s shoulder, and Sherlock felt her go _unh_ , hot air whooshing past Sherlock’s ear as Joan had the breath knocked from her. Then Joan was twisting, slamming her foot down on Sherlock’s toes—Sherlock grunted—trying to get the leverage to shove her. She was so thick with muscle, Sherlock thought, for a moment the idea slicing desperately through her; she was so hard and vital and secretly wild, her heart hidden but thudding, as perhaps it had thudded in those clubs five years ago, to the clatter of jazz, in those clubs where women might work, no, where Joan might work, elbows on the sticky, shiny wood of the bar—

“Holmes! What the hell are you playing at?”

They stumbled apart, Sherlock staring at Joan with her chest heaving, trying to replay the past few seconds so that she could work out what the answer to Fairbanks question actually was. “What?” she asked Fairbanks, not looking at him.

“Trying to get away from her?” Was that what she had been doing? Sherlock’s breath was coming hard, stinging her lungs. Her body—her damnable body, she thought furiously, it was like the thing had a mind of its own. “In that situation, you distract and confuse your opponent, you swing around hard as you can and you drive a knife up under the ribs.” A brief handwave. “In training, you get into a position where that’s feasible.”

Sherlock wrenched her eyes from Joan. “I thought it would be best to get to a position in which I could knock her out,” she said, and it was more or less true; she had worked out what her body had been trying to do, while her mind was blanked out with the whitish smell of Joan’s soap and the lingering scent of her sister’s Soir de Paris.

Fairbanks was having none of it, striding closer and thankfully distracting her from Joan, who was massaging her jaw in the most fascinating way possible. “No. Holmes. Listen. In this situation, your opponent needs to end up dead.”

“But freeing up for a punch to—”

Fairbanks groaned, raised a hand, and interrupted her to ask, “Why not kill him? If you’re that close?” His voice was long-suffering. Sherlock stared at him, pushing her tongue against the roof of her mouth as if trying to find the answer behind her teeth somewhere.

“Surely,” she said, “an unconscious opponent would be easier to dispose of.”

“Easier? _Why not kill him_? Stalling would waste time. If you’ve got your chance, you take it. Difficulty be damned. I would have thought you’d understand that, Holmes.”

There was a moment where the world stuck. Caught on something, it came to a solid, surly halt right outside of the reach of Sherlock’s comprehension. And then, after a few blinks, it was back, she was back, if not understanding then at least faking it—looking at Fairbanks very evenly as she sniffed and said, “Obviously.”

“Good,” Fairbanks said shortly, and then there was a crash and a yell of pain from hallway across the barn, echoing strangely in the closed space. He rolled his eyes with a dramatic fervour and strode off in the direction of the fallen man, announcing in a carrying voice, “Oh, wonderful. Congratulations, Wrigley, you’ve just compromised your entire operation. That, chaps, was a fine demonstration of how not to kill a sentry. Holmes, Watson, separate out, you’re no good to anyone if you only grapple with each other. Watson, pair off with Gregson. Holmes, Mathews.”

“Mathews is a beast,” Sherlock remarked, and when Fairbanks opened his mouth, added, “I _wasn’t complaining_.”

“Sorry,” Joan said, when Fairbanks moved away, stepping closer to give Sherlock a smile, though she didn’t look sorry and Sherlock found she didn’t want her to, not when it might cloud the rough, pleased grin on her face. Her cheeks were still flushed with exertion, and one streak of short dirty blonde hair stuck to the side of her face. Another was pasted across her forehead. She looked very warm, very outdoorsy—competent, compact, wry.

“Are you going to apologise in the field?” Sherlock asked, and swept off more abruptly than was strictly necessary to find Mathews, who was being beastly in a far distant corner of the barn. She didn’t wait to see Joan’s eyes dim or harden, though she knew they were. She stuck her chin out and angrily ignored the quiver of regret which tried to make itself known.

Mathews was a fleshy mountain of a man who grimaced at her when she approached. For his size, she barely saw him; somehow he was difficult to catch when the image of blood heating Joan Watson’s cheeks was so, so _everywhere_ , and she was still wishing, unaccountably, that she hadn’t said that last particularly stupid thing, as if it really mattered whether Joan apologised or not. She was drowning, she thought miserably, and folded her hands into fists.

Mathews was eyeing her with a frown, flexing his huge fingers by his sides. “Fairbanks wants us to, uh...?”

Sherlock nodded with distracted irritation, struggling to get her mind to stop squalling and catching in its own sails. “Yes, Mathews. A trial for you, I’m sure.”

“Well.”

“ _Well_.”

Out of sheer perversity, she refused to make the first move, and instead stuck out her jaw to wait. She didn’t have to wait long. Mathews started towards her in a sudden, fierce movement. She feinted left, drove right; he caught her arm, so she brought down her fist on his wrist and broke the hold. Her body flickered to life somewhere far away from her brain, leaving her to think.

On top of everything, there was the matter of the murdered man, and the mysterious rider with his apt cover and his curious cargo. They had become faceless characters ticking away in the back of her brain, some days urging her on and some days gnawing at her, taunting her with their complete lack of certain substance.

Yes, that was the problem, wasn’t it? (He lunged; she darted backwards). A lack of, of clarity. She often felt as if she were seeing things through half-shut eyes; she felt that she had just woken up and couldn’t focus, that a dreamy absurdity obscured what was real. (She went in low and got cuffed almost gently around the head for her trouble. Her sneer was real as she shoved him backwards: “Don’t.”)

She missed modern medicine. She wished she had never heard of those damnable clubs. And Joan, Joan Watson, she wished—no. She couldn’t wish Joan away.

Joan’s refusal to be her jailor, as she had put it, had startled her at first, even offended her, simply because she hadn’t understood why Joan couldn’t simply do as asked; and then, understanding, it had filled her with a kind of baffled—hope...

But then she hated hope. She had already established that. Just an admission of loss of control.

(“Don’t what?”

“Don’t treat me like I’m made of glass, Mathews. Perhaps you could treat me like you treat your girl at home in Doncaster, that might—”

In the muffled, struggling confusion which followed, she broke his nose.)

“Jesus!”

It wasn’t Mathews who yelled it: Mathews was too busy stumbling backwards, eyes blank with a stunned, animal pain, blood gushing from his nose and streaking down over his lips and chin, seeping through his fingers where he was trying to staunch the flow. No, it was Joan, and she wasn’t looking at Mathews, but at Sherlock. Sherlock turned her face blankly towards her, eyes questioning.

“What?” she asked, and heard her own voice gurgling. She put a hand to her mouth and felt something wet and warm against her fingertips. Blood. And it was coming thicker as she felt it, a thin stream of it pulsing over her fingertips.

The pain exploded messily in her jaw, slamming her back into the real world, where sound suddenly travelled so that Mathews’ gurgling snarl of “Bloody harridan!” and Fairbanks’ mutter of, “Oh, wonderful,” met her ears at once.

Sherlock looked to Joan, who was cutting through the distance between them. Her face was drawn, intent. Not panicked. Very distinctly not panicked. Sherlock stepped automatically closer to her, drawn by her hard steadiness, while the rest of the room seemed to be either yelling or rolling its eyes. “Did he draw blood before me?” she found herself asking. She was trying to sound urgent, private, but her voice was thick and indistinct. The pain was a dull, indifferent ache; her whole lower face was doused in it, and so that she couldn’t feel what was actually causing it.

“Didn’t see,” Joan said, very shortly, her fingertips on Sherlock’s face. “Don’t swallow and don’t try to talk.”

“I—”

“No,” said Joan.

“Is it—”

“Sherlock.”

The first stirrings of anger broke into Sherlock’s voice, and she snapped bloodily, a bubble of red bursting at her lower lip, “I can’t _feel_ anything properly, you need to tell me if it’s—”

There was a gap in her mouth. The side of her tongue dug painfully against the jagged edge of a chipped tooth. She stopped talking.

“It’s fine, but there’s a lot of blood, and I’m about to stick my fingers in your mouth,” Joan said, sliding her hand up to cup Sherlock’s jaw and put her fingertips to Sherlock’s bloody lower lip. “Alright?”

Alright? Joan’s fingers were separated from the thin skin of Sherlock’s lip by a sheen of blood, but Sherlock could feel them; slippery wet and imparting, it seemed, electricity. Alright? Sherlock’s mind seemed to be flashing on and off like a landing light on a lonely airstrip. Signalling to what and for what reason she didn’t know, but signalling. _Here come here land here_. Alright? What could possibly be alright?

“Not _here_ ,” Sherlock groaned, “I’ll—”

Joan sprung back so hard that Sherlock nearly lost her balance, thinking _what now_ , and then Fairbanks descended. Joan’s fingers were streaked with blood, Sherlock saw. Joan’s hands had been near her mouth. For some reason seeing evidence of this having happened struck her with more force than the actual experience.

“You’re not too bad, are you?” Fairbanks asked, reaching out in a way which suggested he wanted to take her chin. Oh God, let him not touch her—every new sensory shock seemed to explode in her brain, whiting out something behind her eyes. Sherlock hunched away from his hand, ducking her head and spitting into her hand to have an excuse for flinching back.

Blood and red spit pooled in her palm. Half her canine was sticking up out of it, island-like. “I’m fine,” she said, feeling wetness streak down her chin.

“It’s to be expected,” Fairbanks said diplomatically, looking between her and Mathews. “Gregson, sort out transport down to the nearest hospital. Separate cars, I think.”

“You were right,” Sherlock said, looking through Fairbanks as if he were a ghost to stare at Joan, who was still watching at her from a distance. As if seeing her through new eyes, and not wanting to. Sherlock felt something wrench inside her, and was glad when it turned to anger and a desire to shock. “Just like school.”

* * *

The military hospital in Inverness was yet another converted stately home, which clutched the remains of its peeling grandeur awkwardly around itself, like a duchess caught undressing. Sherlock sat in a rickety, out of place chair in one of the corridors and held ice to her jaw. This, too, was just like school: sitting in a wrong-doer’s hush while the background rumble of a busy life from which she was silently excluded carried on in the distance.

If anyone had passed, she would have felt humiliated, but there was no one and that was worse. This whole wing seemed uneasily quiet—just offices and storerooms, no wards or other patients. Once, the door at the end of the corridor creaked open, and Sherlock caught a blast of chatter before a young woman’s voice said, “Oh, we can’t, not through there—” and the door shut again.

Sherlock took a deep breath and set her jaw, feeling, very keenly, the ignominy of secrecy. There was something disgraceful about being hidden away—packed off to Europe, sent down from Cambridge, pulled into an empty corridor so Joan could ask her about the pills...

It was different with Joan, though. Joan had that terrible need to not make a fuss, which to Sherlock felt oppressive, stifling—but she had come with her, not sent her away. And she had said, “Your choice.”

Which was nothing, of course, to how she had later said, “I’m your friend.”

The door creaked, opening properly this time. Footsteps clacked closer, and Sherlock looked up hurriedly, almost expecting the Mother Superior.

Instead, she was presented with a blonde, pleasantly rectangular FANY sergeant bearing a glass of water. _Got an RAF sweetheart_ , Sherlock thought, _and her dad keeps dogs_. “Here you are,” the sergeant said, holding out the water. Sherlock took it, and drank, lowering the ice pack to do so. It was there for the swelling, not for the pain: she couldn’t feel a thing. The resident dentist had pricked her gums with an anaesthetic before crowning her broken tooth with gold, hidden with absurdly white acrylic which didn’t match her smoker’s teeth at all. Sherlock had already inspected it with some irritation. “How are you feeling?”

“Numb,” said Sherlock, adding _has younger siblings_ to her list and enunciating carefully to avoid the humiliation of slurring, though she let a loose awkwardness hang in her voice. She paused, and wilfully wobbled. “I…”

“Oh…”

“Sorry,” Sherlock murmured, blinking hard a few times and tossing her curls anxiously back from her face in a nervous, ponyish movement. She swallowed hard, smiled a shaky, mismatched smile. “Sorry, I’ve just not really, er…had a tooth knocked out before.”

“ _Knocked_ out,” the FANY said, eyes popping wider in alarm. Sherlock anxiously interrupted her with, “Well, I mean, like I said, I walked into a lamp post on my way back to my billet, and I mean I’d had a drink—…”

She trailed off; the blonde FANY was looking at her with the appropriate mix of disbelief and concern, with the conclusion she was coming to clearly legible on her face. A nasty boyfriend met on leave who had taken exception to one thing or the other. Well, wasn’t totally wrong; she’d had a run in with a nasty boyfriend, he just hadn’t been hers. Sherlock made sure not to let her triumph cross her face, and asked, rather tremulously and rather bravely, “Could I possibly make a phone call?”

Yes; of course she could. The FANY led her to a black plastic phone mounted incongruously on the fine panelling, and talked her through the different protocols necessary to reach, “Who was it?” “My sister.” “Alright. I’ll give you a moment, shall I, dear?” “Please.”

Once she had clacked off again, Sherlock stuck the receiver between her cheek and shoulder and dialled a number. Then another, and another, until finally she had keyed herself into an eerily quiet line where a woman picked up and said simply, guardedly, “Hullo.”

“Hullo,” said Sherlock amicably. “Charles Bruce-Partington’s office calling; I’d like the number for STS 5, please.”

There was a long wait, during which Sherlock shoved her tongue against her numb gums and tried to console herself with the knowledge that at least studying how long it took for the acrylic to stain would be interesting. She carefully thought of nothing even slightly relevant to the case. She listened out for the shuffle of papers, or the sound of someone consulting with a superior in hushed tones, but there was nothing, not even the sound of breathing. Finally the woman on the end of the line said, “Which STS 5, please?”

Sherlock eyed the wallpaper thoughtfully. The thing to do was to remember that everyone was tired; that everyone hated their job, no matter how clandestine it was. Despite the woman’s schooled-to-blank tone, she wasn’t a machine. Perhaps she had an RAF sweetheart and a father who kept dogs. Or perhaps she swallowed pills and kept thinking about the rough scrape of wool against the fair skin of a female colleague.

With a smile she hoped was audible and a charmingly weary tone borrowed from countless subalterns, Sherlock replied, “Oh, you know. The non-existent one.”

The woman gave an inorganic laugh, and Sherlock knew she’d cracked her. “Quite, ma’am. That’s Guildford 1429 in that case.”

“Thanks awfully.”

Breath coming quickly and evenly, Sherlock replaced the receiver and dialled again—moving fast so as not to disturb or waste the perfect emptiness of her brain. _Guildford?_ part of her mind hissed; she ignored it, clamped down on it; there could be no speculation until she had the facts, she told herself. For a moment, there was nothing in the world but the humming pulse of the rings as she waited.

There was a crackle of connection. “STS 5,” said Harding, and in the split second before Sherlock hung up she had a perfect picture of him sitting at his desk in Wanborough Manor, cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth, scowling down at his paperwork and not wanting to be on the phone at all.

The receiver, returned to its cradle, had a po-faced innocence about it. Sherlock’s fingerprints were already fading from the plastic. She must have been sweating, though she hadn’t felt even slightly nervous. For a few moments, she just looked at the ghostly smears and breathed, feeling the facts began to fit themselves together.

Finally, she smiled. On one side of her mouth.

“Aircraftwoman?”

Sherlock turned. The blonde FANY was rattling up a storm of nunnish heel clicks as she hurried down the corridor. The noise bounced off the stern, peeling walls. “Did you get through to your sister?”

“No,” said Sherlock gaily, manner filling out and changing entirely; no point stammering and brimming with tears now, after all. The FANY stopped, blinking. “Probably still in bed. I don’t know, sergeant, these civilians. I say, there isn’t a kettle anywhere in this place, is there?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t think—”

The telephone began to ring.

Sherlock’s saw the sergeant’s eyes slide to it, looking confused. “How odd,” she said, “that’s really only for outgoing calls, incoming calls come through the Section Officer’s telephone or—”

Sherlock raised a hand, and she fell silent. The phone continued to bleat for attention; Sherlock counted three things, and then it stopped, just as she had known it would. She hauled her face into a smile, not meaning it to be terribly convincing. “Probably my sister calling me back.”

“The switchboard girls must have connected it by mistake,” the FANY said firmly, shaking her head and clearly relieved at having found a scapegoat for this tiny aberration. She gave Sherlock a look which invited her to share in the exasperation. “I suppose they can be awfully swamped with work sometimes. I daresay they cut it off, too.”

“Mm. Kettle?”

“I’m not sure you ought to be drinking anything hot just yet; not with your tooth, and you not able to feel much of your mouth. If you burnt yourself, I’d feel terrible.”

Sherlock waved a hand. “I’ll leave it to go cold. Tea, black and brewed strong. With whatever sweetener you’ve got, as much of it as you can spare.” After a moment, she supplemented this demand with: “Please.” The FANY bustled off, wearing the faintly disagreeable expression of a woman trying to work out why she felt uneasy.

Sherlock shut her out of her mind and turned to the telephone. “Oh, do hurry up,” she said, and right on cue it began to shriek again. She snatched it up.

“Yes, what.”

“What on earth are you playing at?” Mycroft inquired. Her voice was nibbled-on by the static, but the line had the same eerie quietness as the earlier one; none of the tinny buzz of other people’s conversations you often got on other calls.

“Gainful employment. You?”

“Why are you calling from a hospital?”

It wasn’t the question Sherlock had expected. She blinked at the phone’s empty cradle. “I broke my tooth,” she said, startled into truthfulness. And then, unwilling to be overly straightforward, she added: “Well, a nasty boyfriend broke my tooth.”

She could just about hear Mycroft rolling her eyes. She certainly heard the slippery whisper of fabric sliding against soft leather as Mycroft leaned further back into her chair. “ _Really_.”

“Yes, really.” Sherlock licked her lips. She hadn’t felt anything but a glorious, intent calm as she had made her earlier calls, but now her heart was thudding so hard she was amazed Mycroft hadn’t commented on it, and she felt the hard plastic of the receiver slipping against her sweaty palm. Her skin was prickling and her chest felt tight—with the dumb, inexplicable anger Mycroft always inspired in her, but also with a kind of boastful eagerness to let Mycroft know _exactly_ what she was doing. And let her choke on it. “Now that we’ve established you haven’t got to support me as an invalid—” Mycroft gave a sort of exclamatory un-laugh, a sceptical _hm!_ that she would never make if she didn’t want it to be heard “—shall we move onto the more pertinent questions?”

“I believe I already asked you what you think you’re playing at.”

“And I answered.”

Between them, an ocean of static and uneasy history rolled. Leviathans stirred in it. Sherlock suddenly regretted picking up. It was always Mycroft’s silences that did this; pushed her anger too far, made it sour and cloying enough to inconvenience her. She had only wanted Mycroft to know—what? That she was doing something, maybe; that, in spite of Mycroft’s best efforts, her life was getting interesting again. 

Instead she just felt, once more, disastrous and pitiable.

“Sherlock—”

“You _repel_ me.” The words burst forth from her. She was gripping hard at the plastic phone cradle, her breaths coming in long, jagged heaves. “I suppose I repel you?”

Again, the silence.

“Do watch yourself, Sherlock,” Mycroft said finally. “I would rather things not go the way of 1939.”

Sherlock let out her breath in a slow exhale. “I didn’t invade Poland,” she said, “and I didn’t think you had time for lesser crimes.” She slammed down the receiver and stared at the wallpaper, swallowing down what felt like a century of anger.

“Aircraftwoman—”

“What?”

“Well!” said the FANY, who looked shocked by her tone, and stepped back with her eyebrows up. She was holding a teacup out in front of her, and the black liquid inside sloshed and reeled. She pulled it closer to her chest, looking defiant, but Sherlock snatched it off her.

“ _Thank you_ ,” she snapped, taking a gulp and feeling it scald her throat, though the inside of her mouth was numb to it. “Go.”

Sherlock was left alone in the corridor, listening to the clatter of the sergeant’s footsteps dying away, until everything was silent and there was nothing left to do but wait and try to think through the mess of anger which she really should have expected. Teach her to wilfully engage Mycroft, she thought. All her sister ever did was throttle her mind in one way or another.

At least, with her anger to interrogate and separate out into as many strands as possible ( _ever since we were young—pompous—traitorous—believes I’m still a child_ ), and her newly-acquired knowledge ( _Harding—explosives—murdered man_ ) her brain was occupied as she waited. When a different FANY, this one a corporal, arrived to drive her back to Swordland Lodge, it hardly seemed like she had been waiting for four hours at all.

The drive passed in much the same way, with Sherlock staring listlessly out of the window at the empty road, her head full of glinting, disturbing facts and a dull anger she was beginning to hit the bottom of, having mined it for hours. There was only one interruption to the journey’s monotony, which was when Sherlock suddenly shot up straight and grabbed the back of the driver’s seat, yelling, “Stop! Stop the car!”

But the FANY chauffeur, having given up her voice for Victory, didn’t slow or even give any sign that she had heard Sherlock’s cry; and Sherlock was left to smack her fist uselessly against the upholstery and throw herself back against the seat with a groan, having just seen a motorcycle and its rider, undoubtedly with apt cover, speed off past them in a direction which could only imply that it had just left Swordland Lodge.

* * *

Sherlock had climbed the stairs in a haze of frustration and trepidation, and now saw the room differently, as if for the first time.

To her mind, there was something strangely ritualistic about how they had preserved the set-up of the room in Swordland Lodge so that it mirrored that of the room in Wanborough Manor. Even though the fireplace in Swordland was on a different side, Sherlock’s bed was still the furthest to the left upon walking through the door. Joan’s was still next to it, and Molly’s was next to Joan’s—providing, Sherlock supposed, with a flash of annoyance at being _fenced off_ , a buffer zone between her and Sally.

All three of her roommates looked up at Sherlock as she stood in the doorway, each woman sitting on her own bed. Molly was ignoring a magazine, Sally had a book in her lap, and Joan had a needle and thread in hand to finally fix her corporal’s stripe. Apt cover, Sherlock thought. For all of them. What was this? A planned ambush?

Under their combined gaze, Sherlock’s lip curled, her guts churning, aware of that feeling Mycroft’s call had woken up and made pressing—that feeling of being _disastrous_. She suddenly wanted to just skip all the nonsense people thought about her, and even the nonsense she thought about herself, and get back to the cold hard facts of the case. There was too much _stuff_ going on, she thought, skin suddenly crawling. Her life was agonisingly cluttered with things that got in her _way_.

“I’m fine,” she snapped. It was more or less true. Her jaw was less swollen, and feeling was returning to her mouth; it ached, but it was distant, irrelevant. She looked to Joan, trying desperately to convey the fact that she had news, but Joan was looking down, fussing with her needle for some reason, though it was already threaded.

“Bannager wants to see you,” said Sally.

“Really,” Sherlock said with no enthusiasm, watching Joan stare at the needle as if she had forgotten what to do with it.

“Really. Well done.”

“Oh, shut up, Donovan,” Sherlock muttered, jerking her chin towards her but not looking away from Joan’s bowed, blonde head, and the way she was now tugging the thread almost to breaking point. “Joan—”

But Sally had exploded in a sudden outrage, slamming her book shut with a hard _snap_. “Excuse me? I was talking to you! Or, I’m sorry, am I not good enough to speak to—”

“What,” Sherlock said.

“Wait,” said Joan, finally raising her head from her sewing, and Sherlock looked to her—but Joan’s eyes were already sliding across to Sally, dismissing Sherlock’s gaze. “Both of you, wait. Sherlock just thought you were being sarky, Sally. Miscommunication. Alright? …That is right, Sherlock, isn’t it?”

Sherlock blinked at Joan, then at Sally, and realised she was expected to respond. She felt rather like she had missed a step, and was struggling to regain her balance. This, of course, just gave weight to the theory of her being intrinsically disastrous, she could see that. None of this seemed quite real, not compared to the thoughts still darting about her head like fireflies, dancing just behind her eyes. The desire to get down to fact. It was difficult to concentrate on anything else. “I just…thought you were being sarky—sarcastic,” she said slowly, echoing and then editing when she realised how unnatural Joan’s slang sounded in her voice. “What did you mean?”

For a few moments too long, Sally just looked at her with her book clutched tight between her fingers and her face inscrutable. “I meant well done,” she said finally, her tone flat and resigned. It was a familiar tone; not from Sally, but from various people Sherlock had met before. The _I’ve tried and it’s useless_ tone. “I meant well done for socking him one. I don’t like him. Alright? Nothing more complex. No deeper meaning.”

“Oh,” said Sherlock.

“Yeah. Oh.”

There didn’t seem to be much more to say, though Sherlock suspected that in theory she should try—but damn it, what was the point? She looked at Sally for a moment longer, and then wheeled swiftly back to Joan. “Joan, a word.”

“You could apologise,” Joan said, and Sherlock’s heart lurched angrily inside her chest at the idea that she should have to apologise for—what? Two words, three words, after a smack to the jaw, two or three words which had terrified Joan and which Sherlock herself couldn’t explain.

“I’m _sorry_ ,” she hissed, pushing her shoulders back and spitting it like an insult.

And Joan blinked, frowned, then finally looked at her. Her gaze like a bright blue hook. “I,” she said slowly, “I meant to Sally, actually.”

Sherlock’s shoulders lowered by the barest centimetre. She lifted her chin, and settled back. And felt looked-at.

After a few moments, she looked to Sally, who held up a hand. “No thanks,” she said. “Have that word.”

Sherlock looked from one to the other, her face totally impassive. Sally’s eyebrows were raised and Molly was staring at a single word in her magazine with unseeing intensity, her cheeks stained vicarious pink. Joan looked startled—and yet oddly conclusive, as if she had just realised something and couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it before.

Sherlock wheeled around stiffly and left the room, feeling the vibrations of Joan’s footsteps coming after her a few moments after. When she reached the bathroom at the end of the hall, she had to forcibly remind herself to turn and hold the door.

“Okay,” said Joan, stepping inside after a moment of hesitation which seemed to last for centuries, and which imprinted itself indelibly on Sherlock’s mind. She let the door fall shut, and eyed the lock, but then decided there was no point. “Is this to do with—”

“Yes,” Sherlock said. She was still facing the door, her hand on the doorknob. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Joan sitting down on the side of the tub. “ _Wanborough_.”

“What?”

“STS 5 is Wanborough Manor,” Sherlock said, turning to face her properly. Joan was in her pajamas and bare feet, her elbows on her knees as she frowned up at Sherlock. Sherlock watched her face change slowly, her eyebrows raising, as she leant backwards and put her hands on the rim of the tub.

“You think that call to Carter was something to do with what Harding’s asked you to investigate,” Joan said. Her voice was carefully blank, but her eyes were questioning.

“The murdered man.”

“We need to call him something else. That sounds like something out of a detective novel.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. He’s a man and he’s been murdered; those are the facts. It’s not as if he currently has any other distinguishing features, anyway. Not that we know of.”

“He was a spy,” Joan pointed out.

“Yes, the murdered spy; that sounds much more realistic.” Sherlock waved the argument away with an irritable flail of her hand, shaking her head. “It doesn’t matter, Joan. I called STS 5 and got Harding answering. I assume STS therefore stands for Special Training School, or Specialist Training School—”

“Steady on. How did you call STS 5?”

Sherlock had to throw her brain into reverse to work out what Joan meant and why she was asking, and blinked as her mental gears ground. “Oh, my sister has a Foreign Office position. I’ve been through her desk—there are certain offices, police liaisons and the like, which one can call to requisition numbers, addresses, personal information... It’s really just housekeeping stuff—it hardly matters. The evidence matters.”

“You’ve got a sister? No—I mean—hold on—”

“Explosives, Joan! If there’s been some kind of explosion in connection with Harding’s man, if that was how he died, then Harding’s trying to discover who did it by cross-referencing what happened in France with the styles of demolition favoured by certain agents during their training. Which quite possibly means that right now, somewhere in France, someone working for the British government is a murderer.”

“But are you saying you called some secret government office—”

“Hardly secret, just so boring no one can find it within themselves to care. Why are you so fixated on that? This is secret. We’re secret.”

Joan’s eyebrows were arched helplessly upwards. In her confusion, her face was as her creased white pajamas—until she slumped, shaking her head, and gave in. Sherlock felt her own shoulders relax in response.

Joan rubbed her face, threaded her fingers through her hair, the colour of which always made Sherlock think of farms and beaches and hard, outdoorsy places. There was a strange sense of breathlessness; with a sudden alarm, Sherlock realised she was waiting for Joan’s verdict, and had just mentally rounded on herself in disgust when Joan said, “I believe you,” and all former feelings were knocked right out of Sherlock’s chest.

“Oh,” she said, after a baffled pause. “Really?”

“Yes,” Joan said, laughing in a strange, almost unhappy way, though her eyes were bright. “God help me, I…think you’re onto something. But look here, Sherlock: this explosion and the murdered man, all we know is Harding is investigating both. They could be completely unrelated.”

“Do you think so?”

“No,” said Joan after a moment, standing up and tugging on the hem of her pajama shirt, pulling the creases out of it. She cleared her throat. “No, I don’t.”

“Good. I—”

“And, actually, I’ve got something for you.”

Sherlock stopped, dumbfounded, and Joan looked awkward. “Well, what?” Sherlock prompted finally.

“You know how Carter’s notes mentioned a rider with apt cover?”

“Yes,” Sherlock said, fighting to keep a hungry fascination out of her voice and off her face.

“He was here,” Joan said.

Sherlock’s shoulders slumped. “Well, I know _that_ ,” she said.

“That’s not all,” Joan continued, holding up a hand. Her eyes glinted with an emotion which produced a kind of déjà vu in Sherlock: familiar but unrecognisable until she realised, with a shock that was both delighted and indignant, that it was the same sort of excitement she felt upon making Joan ask _what does it mean?_ “I saw him come in while we were out on a run. When we got in, I said I was going to shower before dinner, and went down to the garage to wait for him to get back on his bike.” Here she stopped, looked both pleased and embarrassed.

Sherlock’s heart sank slowly. “Oh,” she said.

“What?”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Do what any sensible female might do when presented with a man who possesses information she needs, obviously.”

“What?” said Joan. “No, I gave him a flat tire.”

Sherlock nearly choked on relief and laughter, managing to swallow it all down before she could groan with either, and bore up magnificently considering the circumstances. “Good, Joan,” she managed. “Very good. And then, you…”

“Then I helped him fix it. And got a look at—well, first, here.” From the pocket of her pajamas, she plucked a few folded pages, clearly taken from a small notebook. “I wrote out his description for you, as much detail as I could remember—you know, in case you wanted to do your thing with him. But I also knocked over his bag and got a look at what he was carrying.”

“Yes?” Sherlock said, giving up on trying not to sound eager, stepping closer.

“It’s not much. Five files. Labelled, uh—God.” But though Sherlock’s heart sank at the idea of lost data, Joan wasn’t blaspheming because she had forgotten. Rather, it almost seemed that she was embarrassed at remembering, and she rattled the names off hastily, as if trying to get them out as fast as possible. “ Mitchels, Brook, Walthamstow, Barrington, Fielding. Walthamstow was marked _deceased 2/1/1942_. Couldn’t get a look inside.”

Sherlock breathed in slowly, like she was trying to inhale the new data. It wasn’t too far from the truth. Her shoulders lowered, and she let the facts sink in. “No. No, of course you couldn’t. Still…”

“Still, worth a—”

“The first flight.”

“Sorry?”

“They sent a black Lysander pilot over to France on four different occasions to pick up Harding’s murdered man, after those distress calls I told you about. He was never where he said he would be. The first flight was on the second of January. The day Walthamstow died.”

Joan looked hesitant, shoulders lowering slightly. “So Walthamstow isn’t the murdered man.”

“No,” said Sherlock. “No, he is. He must be. Come on, what’s the likelihood of there being two recently deceased agents under investigation, both of whom were under Harding’s jurisdiction? —I could believe it if he hadn’t died the very night the first black Lysander flight to rescue him came, but no, that's too _neat_.”

“So the distress calls were faked,” Joan said with mounting excitement. “Including the first, which means someone planned to have the first flight and the murder on the same night—right?”

“Doesn’t mean the first was faked, just means someone knew it had been placed. They had to know that the rescue flight would take place on the next full moon after...” Sherlock’s voice, flaring eager, faded slightly and she leaned back, wrinkling her nose. “Which Harding will know by now, of course,” she added, irritated by it. Joan opened her mouth, then closed it again, apparently thinking better of what she had been planning to say.

Eventually, she mused, “RB. Is that R Barrington or R Brook?”

“Don’t know,” Sherlock said, hearing a vagueness in her voice, shaking her head. She was staring at the tiles beyond Joan’s head, eyes unfocused, thinking. Then a smile stole across her face. “You gave him a flat tire.”

“And then helped him sort it out. I’d like that remembered too, thanks.”

Sherlock looked to Joan, and said, almost accidentally, “Marvellous.”

Joan’s lovely square face was, for a moment, a picture of laughing shock, and then settled down into stunned belief, and then just amused scepticism. “Yes, that’s me,” she said, but didn’t quite attain the dry tone she was aiming for.

Sherlock shrugged, swallowed, didn’t move; they were standing quite close together, she realised, and wondered why she hadn’t realised as much before.

“Is your tooth,” Joan began, and Sherlock said, “Yes, fine, like I said,” and Joan agreed hurriedly: “You said, yeah. Sorry.”

Sherlock shrugged again, an irritable, uncertain movement, her eyes slipping to and from Joan’s face. “The crown’s very obvious, unfortunately,” she said, rather inanely.

“Smile and let’s see.”

Sherlock blinked down at her, then slowly drew her lips up, rather uncertainly. Joan laughed. “That’s not actually a smile.”

“It’s rather difficult to bully someone into smiling.”

“ _I’m_ bullying _you_? Right. —Look. Oh, come on, that’s not so bad.” Sherlock had grinned; and Joan had raised her hand, holding her fingers just an inch from Sherlock’s lips. Slowly, both their smiles faded. Joan kept her hand where it was, hovering in the space between them. She swallowed; Sherlock saw it. “What did you think you had to apologise for earlier?”

Sherlock parted her lips soundlessly, and too late realised that it made her feel more exposed than ever. “Oh,” she said, trying to sound careless, “I don’t know. People usually believe I should apologise for something or other. I thought it might clear the air.” 

Joan didn’t say anything, but her hand wavered closer, and for a moment Sherlock could almost feel the brush of her fingertip to the exposed inside of her lower lip—and then Joan dropped her hand. Sherlock blinked, and leaned back, breathing for what felt like the first time in minutes.

“Air’s clear,” Joan said.

“Good,” Sherlock replied, edging away. “Shall we—”

“Yeah, let’s. You must be tired. After all that.”

“What? Oh. The tooth. Mm, exhausted. But I’ve got to call in to Bannager, of course. What do you think I’ll get—a telling-off or disciplinary chores?”

“A thorough bollocking and you’ll get put on jankers.”

“You’re so _army_. So I did break his nose before he broke my tooth, after all? And you said you hadn’t seen?”

“Go report to the Major, Holmes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading!
> 
>  **"Captain Fairbanks"** \- A nod to a [William E. Fairbairn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_E._Fairbairn), who was a real SOE instructor for close combat, and developed his own hand-to-hand combat system. Fairbanks and Fairbairn have more than just a similar name; Fairbairn was quoted as telling his pupils, "Get tough, get down in the gutter, win at all costs... I teach what is called ‘Gutter Fighting.’ There’s no fair play, no rules except one: kill or be killed."
> 
>  **"Why not kill him?"** \- This was a phrase repeated over and over again in close combat. There's a section in a training manual giving advice to teachers which explains how to react to students asking why they haven't been taught x or y, and the answer to that is always: that's not fatal, why not kill him? ...So, yes.
> 
> I'm going to have to deliver unfortunate news: while the next chapter is coming, it may arrive late. This isn't a matter of not having it written (I've got Chapter 14 started, put it that way; I'm ahead) but just of having a lot of futzing around with it I want to do, plus having had a crazy week and expecting couple more crazy weeks coming up. My dear and beautiful beta lbmisscharlie, whom I do not namedrop enough, is also moving and therefore has plenty of things to do which don't involve pointing out my grammatical errors. (I'm mainly just bringing this up because she's great and needs her name splashed all over this; any lateness will be my fault alone; also if you ever spot an error it's because I'm a compulsive tweaker and habitually mess with things just before posting, _like an idiot_ ).
> 
> Hopefully, hopefully, I will be able to give you Chapter 9 on Monday 26th. If not, it will appear on or before September 2nd, which is the Monday after that. If you want updates on...updates, I usually witter on my [tumblr](http://reckonedrightly.tumblr.com/). (If you've no desire to follow, the tag 'no bangs without foreign office approval' will accompany all No Bangs chat, so you can poke through there and see what the deal is). Thank you, ever so much, for your patience and attention, no matter what <3


	9. The Heart Of Any Target.

Sherlock breathed in the broken-open air of five in the morning, and knocked on the back door. It was perfectly possible to access the kitchens without ever needing to step outdoors, and on the second-to-last day of the course Sherlock was more than aware of it, but Bannager had been unpleasantly specific about it. She was to use the back door. Orders were orders. Sherlock didn’t care; trying to make people feel like servants was really a middle class pastime, and in any case the morning was watercolour fresh, clear, the air frozen full of brittle pinks and oranges.

The door opened, revealing a gangly girl without a wisp of colour to her, who said, “Yes?” in a Scottish accent which drew out the vowel. She was wearing a white headscarf and a matching apron, and her long, colourless fingers clenched and unclenched in the fabric of the latter.

“Holmes,” Sherlock said, putting out her hand and hearing her own accent swell to new heights of plumminess, running away with itself. “Sherlock Holmes. I believe Major Bannager wants me to peel potatoes for six hours. Discipline, you know.”

The girl raised her eyebrows at Sherlock’s offered hand, so Sherlock shrugged and dropped it. “People don’t get put on jankers here,” she said, with a guarded hostility.

Sherlock said, “I know. I’m a trailblazer.” 

“You—we never—well, I don’t know if we’ve got potatoes.”

“You’ve got potatoes. Potatoes are more or less half of what we eat.”

“Aye, well, still, you get better beef than I’ve seen in a while,” the girl said, with sudden sharpness. It was like watching her come abruptly into focus. Then her expression faded to one of slightly impressed suspicion. “What did you do?”

“We’d be here all day.”

The girl bit her lip angrily and finally said, “You’d better come talk to the cook, then, hadn’t you.”

She led her into the kitchen, where heat and noise made the air thick and a company of women hurried about in a shared state of white-aproned annoyance, banging kettles and slicing bread for toast. They were preparing their own breakfast, not the one which would be served later to the students and instructors. The cook, when they found her, proved to be an Edinburgh FANY with a laughing mouth and fine, ever-moving dark eyebrows, who seemed entirely unperturbed by Sherlock’s presence. She did, however, mishear her name as Charlotte. “The Major might have told me to expect more hands,” she said, quite happily.

Sherlock, whose mind was fixed firmly on future events, and who had decided to look at being put on jankers as an excuse to watch said events unfold from a potentially advantageous viewpoint, let her mouth rattle on in the best traditions of finishing-school fluttering: “To be honest, I’m meant to be doing it all during the afternoon and evening, but I’ve plans—I wouldn’t mind if it was just me, but if I don’t follow through I’ll let down a whole _host_ of girls.” A whole _host_ of girls! —she should remember that one for the next time she needed to do this; it was almost deliriously chirpy. “So I thought I might lend a hand early in the morning instead. I’ve two hours before breakfast, since the run’s on later today, and then I can come back in the afternoon.”

“Well, it’s a nice surprise, I’ll tell you that. What was it that landed you in hot water, ducks? Unshined shoes?”

“Mislaid cap,” Sherlock said. The cook guffawed unreasonably, if not unpleasantly, and pointed her towards a corner with a sack of potatoes, telling Anais—the colourless, cold girl who had answered the door—to kit her out with an apron and a knife—“and see if you’ve something to wrap that hair back in, or they’ll be finding curls in their tatties.”

“Scullery,” Anais said snappishly, after pushing an armful of starched white cotton on Sherlock. “This way. Bring that basin over there.” She reached for the sack of potatoes and carried it along without even a grunt of effort, tossing it down onto the scullery floor once she had opened the door, interrupting two gossiping kitchen assistants, who immediately started scrubbing at an entirely clean saucepan in the sink. “Go make yourselves useful, why don’t youse?” They fled quickly. Sherlock tied on her apron and gritted her teeth as Anais took it upon herself to sort out a plain white headscarf for her. Finally, she sat down at the table, pulling it slightly closer to the window. She pushed a smile onto her face, eyes crumpling up.

“That’s marvellous, thanks,” she said, more than ready to be left alone. But Anais just snorted, and dropped down into the seat opposite her. She picked up a potato and a knife of her own.

Sherlock said, her voice quiet, “Anais.”

Anais’ pale head snapped up. Sherlock had a brief, fragmented thought—that it was shocking how many shades of blonde there were, how Anais could look so ghostly when other blondes could be ruddy, sandy, their hair as dark and lively a gold as the sunlight pouring across the side of the hills. She batted the thought away. “There’s no need,” Sherlock said. “You’ve other things to do.”

“Still,” Anais said, resolute and cold, bowing her head again to stare down at her hands.

“You’re insulted,” Sherlock said. Anais stilled, half way through skinning her potato with rough, efficient movements, but didn’t look up. “You don’t think it’s right for someone like me to be down here.” 

Anais’ mouth pinched. She finished up the potato, dropping it, pale and naked-looking, into the basin. “Doesn’t matter what I think, does it?”

“Probably only to you,” Sherlock said. “Still, that’s one person.”

“I’m not—insulted.”

“Of course you are. This is your contribution to the war effort, after all, and here I am doing it for a couple of hours as a punishment for, ah...”

“Mislaying your cap.” Anais did Sherlock’s accent, and for a moment Sherlock gave a bristle of irritation, but she smoothed it over, reminding herself of her aim.

“I broke a man’s nose, actually. And I mislaid my cap.” Anais looked up again, startled, and Sherlock carried on, working her knife clumsily under the skin of the potato in her hand: “Nonetheless. Here I am—Cambridge, Conservatoire de Paris, more or less able to trace the English part of the family back to before the Norman Conquest, though why one would _want_ to—here I am doing your job as a slap on the wrist. _I’d_ be irritated, if I were you.” She frowned down at the rather misshapen potato, unevenly peeled. “After all, this posting’s a good thing for you, since your mother died and your sweetheart’s elsewhere—”

Anais reared back so that the legs of her chair scraped noisily against the tiled floor. “How—”

“Because you’ve got an old wedding ring around your neck, under your blouse. Old chain, too; it was on there before. So, widowed mother, deceased, beloved. And because you aren’t wearing perfume but your hands smell of it faintly; I caught it when you were fixing my hair. You spray it on letters, then you fold them into the envelope, though not before kissing the paper—you’ve got a little lipstick still caught on your lip, because you put it on this morning to sign the letter and then took it off before anyone else could see. Very simple.”

Anais was terribly still, her knife catching the sunlight from the window. “Why don’t you go and have breakfast?” Sherlock suggested, working her voice into as kind a tone as she could manage. “He’s awfully fond of you. It’s very obvious. Your hands, you see.”

It wasn’t. Sherlock had no idea whether Anais’ boyfriend was fond of her or not, and was aware that if she was asked, she would have to make something up on the spot. For a moment, Anais seemed to waver, opening her mouth, a look of earnest longing welling up in the depths of her eyes, and Sherlock wondered if she would fall for palmistry. But then Anais checked her raw swell of yearning and retreated back inside her stiff, white exterior. She stood up, threw down the knife; it flashed light across the table. And she left, subdued, quietly shocked.

Sherlock leaned back and relaxed, her expression of sympathy dissolving.

The scullery was chilly, white-tiled, and so well-scrubbed it looked grimy and stripped-down as a result. A good room to be alone in; empty, cool. Finally: silence—solitude—and it was as she had suspected, she thought, turning her head to look out of the window, across the rolling hills turned slightly bluish by the window-glass. She had a view of where the staff cars were parked when they were kept at the lodge overnight; where they parked when they rolled up to the house.

Her reasons for coming to the kitchen early were nothing to do with wanting to keep her evening free.

She peeled potatoes rhythmically, quickly, glad to occupy her hands. She had been fumbling purposefully in front of Anais so that no one would expect her to be particularly quick about it. They’d probably write her off as useless and be glad to have her doing something harmless out of the way. Left alone, the knife flashed easily in her hand, and the pile of peeled potatoes rose higher and higher. She kept her eyes on the window. Twelve minutes past five. She scraped another potato bare. Another. Working blind, by now, keeping her head empty as she stared out of the window. She would observe, then deduce. For the moment she simply had to record images, with all the perfect detachment of a machine.

The view was clear. The cars were like sleeping beasts, only momentarily mute; behind them, at the edges of the forest, she could see the makeshift targets which Fairbanks preferred to typical roundels hanging from the trees like forgotten flags. All the signs of life, with none of its stirrings.

Sherlock blinked once, hard. Fifteen minutes past five.

Her expectations were clear—were based off past experience. The car would be a black Wolseley, oily in the golden green countryside, rumbling up the drive and to its allocated place, just like the car which had driven up to RAF Tangmere that time. The FANY driver would step out, and open the door for a glamourous woman in a perfect dark suit with a tapered skirt—high heels which wouldn’t slow her down on the grass—her hair curled and her lipstick tasteful. All strange, acrylic, plastic, out of place in the wild countryside, but undeniably sharp.

It was twenty minutes past five now; where was she?

Her face would be patently anonymous; Mycroft wouldn’t send one of the ladies whom Sherlock had already met—like the woman who had stepped out of the car in RAF Tangmere the last time Mycroft had felt compelled to step in, or to get someone to step in on her behalf. Quite likely _this_ woman would work in an office in Inverness, because Mycroft preferred to get local connections to do favours rather than send people cross-country, Sherlock being the obvious exception.

The anonymous lady wouldn’t mention Mycroft, because officially Mr Bruce-Partington would have sent her, or directed someone to direct someone to send her, signing off on the order as he did everything which Mycroft placed in front of him. Or rather everything which Mycroft sent to be passed along to him, because Mycroft felt it would be tasteless and ridiculous to hurry in and out of her office all the time, considering the amount of work she had put into acquiring said office in the first place.

When Mycroft was settled, she was solid. No one could move her. No one could change her routine. Certainly no one could make her, or anyone she deemed suitable to act for her, late.

So Sherlock watched with a fierce lack of emotion as, apparently, the impossible happened—beginning to feel ill, beginning to feel like perhaps she had been wrong. 

No one arrived.

Half past five. The countryside remained clear and still. Mocking her with its unstirring calm. Being so—so—she gave a sudden violent, wrenching movement, mouth twisting as her hand sliced, and then glanced down to look at the deep gash she had just scored in a potato’s flesh. She peeled it, chopped it in two where she had stabbed it, and threw both halves into the basin. 

She breathed in, breathed out; didn’t so much remember as feel the past clinging to her skin, unshakeable.

The woman at RAF Tangmere had given her name, very vaguely, as Anthea, and had arrived just after the second time Sherlock had left off taking her Nembutal in order to stare out at the dark shapes of the Westland Lysanders coming in and out. She had arrived at fifteen minutes past five in the morning, or so Sherlock later determined from the marks left by the car. She had looked in on Sherlock while Sherlock was being attended to by the medical officers; this, too, had to be determined at a later date, bullied out of an ACW2 who had been charged with leading Anthea around. After that she had had coffee, inspected the control tower, and spent a number of hours locked in private conversation with a Flight Officer. By the time she and Sherlock met properly, it was midday. Sherlock was still in bed, swaddled in sheets and with her head pounding horribly.

A dark shape was Sherlock’s first impression; dark, but smooth, ample. Her eyes struggled to focus, but even through the strange film which seemed to coat everything, she recognised the sort of woman who was standing in her doorway. Anthea had thick dark curls, a tiny waist, wide hips, breasts which strained the front of her beautifully cut blouse. Sherlock hated her on sight, but she was in a hateful mood; would have detested anyone who came to the door, for the sheer violent pleasure of being angry and disgusted at someone other than herself.

Anthea closed the door, and sat on the end of Sherlock’s bed without asking. “Hullo,” she said, her voice smirking, polished, low. Sherlock detected a family with money but a short history—something in how Anthea crossed her legs, smiled, something in the coffee sheen of her American nylons, and in how her lipstick was dark and slick. “You must be Sherlock Holmes. I’m Anthea. Bad time?”

Sherlock—her uncombed, sticky hair straggling around her clammy features, aware that her eyes were red and her face was sunken—said, “I’m fine.”

“Can I ask what’s wrong?”

“You already know.”

“Yes, you had a fit.”

“I got _dizzy_.”

“Fair enough.”

That seemed to be that for Anthea. She slipped her handbag off her shoulder and sat it in her lap, snapping it open with a finicky, manicure-preserving flick of her fingers—what a gesture, Sherlock thought, suddenly irritated; simply no class at all; was this, consorting with moneyed middles, Mycroft’s version of _making do and mending?_

Immediately after the thought occurred to her, she was disgusted with herself; how prim. How like Mycroft—how like the sisters at La Chassotte, and the tutors at Cambridge. She wasn’t angry at Anthea, really; her anger was shapeless, liquid, running down any path which opened before it, irrelevant of what that path was. Did she really care if Anthea, of no apparent surname, rummaged openly in her handbag and wore shiny nylon stockings in a very middle class way? How boring she was these days.

And yet when Anthea drew papers and tobacco, and began to roll a cigarette on the flat plane of a notebook, Sherlock just had to interrupt. “You’re from my sister.”

Anthea raised her eyebrows pleasantly down at her work as she pinched and poked her line of tobacco into place. “Sorry, I’m from GC&CS. Don’t suppose you know what that is?”

“It’s the Government Code and Cypher School, and you’re from my sister,” Sherlock snapped, gripping tighter at the sheets and hoping Anthea would be thorough when she reported back to Mycroft; that she wouldn’t leave out a single greasy strand of hair, or the ripe tang of sweat. It was no use hoping to impress Mycroft; disgust came much more easily to her, and Sherlock was determined to elicit some reaction. Any reaction at all.

“ ’Fraid not,” Anthea said, with a bountiful smile. Sherlock grimaced. She had that creased, sticky, too-hot feeling of having been in bed for much too long, and her mouth didn’t just taste terrible, but had a matted, furry texture on its inside. She rubbed her tongue along her teeth and regretted the exploration. “GC&CS have access to certain records—”

“—which is or was your area, hence how Mycroft plucked you,” still shoving her tongue unhappily about her mouth, “from obscurity—”

Anthea spoke over her: “Your Morse Code is really terribly good.”

Sherlock snorted. “I know.”

“Thirty three words per minute?”

“Thirty six, when people aren’t leaning over my shoulder.”

“How do you do with other codes?” Anthea inquired. There was a schooled, calm warmth in her voice. Smooth and untouchable.

And Sherlock hated—hated—hated. It congealed in her chest, stuck in her throat. She was cold on the inside, everything within her thickening and chilling and hardening, _understanding_. So this was Mycroft’s game.

Slowly, she leant forwards—forwards—until Anthea looked up from her half-rolled cigarette and looked at her face, eyebrows arched up. Her eyes were hazel, mocking.

Inches from Anthea’s face, Sherlock said, “If I came to work for your miserable little department, the Germans wouldn’t have a code left standing within two weeks. But I’m not interested.” Anthea’s eyebrows only climbed. Sherlock stayed there for a moment, then slumped backwards against her pillows. “Tell Mycroft I’ve never wanted her handouts.”

Anthea licked her cigarette paper, rolled it, and said, “That’s a shame.”

“And tell her I’m fine. A dizzy spell. Tell her I’m taking my medicine now. Or, really, if you like, tell her I had a fit. Tell her it doesn’t matter because she can’t do anything, though it might make her feel better to pretend that she can fix things with a wave of her governmental magic wand. And get out.”

The lighter Anthea pulled from her bag was monogrammed, gold, chunky, and produced a burst of flame tall enough to put her eyelashes in danger. She leaned into it, lit her cigarette, breathed deep, and snapped it shut. “Fine. Stay here, then,” she said, and got up, hitching her bag back onto her shoulder. “Cheerio.”

Perhaps she wanted Sherlock to change her mind. She certainly left enough time for it, walking slowly from Sherlock’s bed to the door. But Sherlock said nothing and Anthea didn’t wait. The door snapped shut after her, and Sherlock was alone with her decision.

But it was all very well. She was too tired to feel anything but a dull, bone-deep anger, and by now she knew how to deal with that. It seemed to simmer somewhere inside her at all times.

Sherlock knew why Mycroft had sent Anthea. Of course, as she was Sherlock’s next of kin, Mycroft had been notified of her collapse the previous day; and as she was Mycroft and therefore omniscient to the bitter end, she had realised that Sherlock must have been playing around with her medication. Slipping up—mucking up—ruining her own routine. Scavenging for anything which might interest her and damaging herself in the process. And so Mycroft had sent Anthea along with a proposition; a way out; a hand-out.

It might have been good, to work with codes. God only knew it couldn’t be less interesting than RAF Tangmere. But…

_Stay here._

Sherlock’s face was pushed into the pillow. She inhaled the smell of her own soap; stale smoke; military starch. _Restez içi_. (She practiced languages in her head sometimes; thinking in French, Norwegian, Russian; staying in one place). Yes. She’d stay here. And damn the rest of them. She’d just stay here, mummified in the sheets, where no one, least of all herself, expected anything.

This was her life, and if all she could do was wreck it then at least she wasn’t letting someone else steer her past the rocks, into false calm.

In the scullery in Swordland Lodge, Sherlock took a deep breath in through her nose, and opened her eyes, tightened her lips, feeling plagued with the past. She sliced hard into a potato and nearly opened up the pad of her own thumb in a restless, jerking motion which left her angry with her own carelessness.

There was a flicker of movement in the outside world, and her hands stopped moving.

So Mycroft had, after all, decided to send someone along to ask after her, to offer her another easy out, to throw her a lifeline and thereby insinuate she was drowning—

Oh. No. It wasn’t that at all. Sherlock’s lips parted as she stared out of the window.

Joan, in battle dress and with her hair pushed back, was walking across the grass. Sherlock lowered her hands. Half five...yes, now was when they would usually wake up, but there was no run this morning; Bannager had decided they should take advantage of the heat and run at high noon, instead. Something about acclimatisation. Getting them used to hot work. Most had been glad for the chance to sleep late.

Joan wasn’t wearing her shirt and tie beneath her battle dress jacket. Couldn't be expecting, then, to meet any officers; Bannager in particular disliked the habit. She moved with a casual determination; at her waist hung a pistol holstered in brown leather. It should have been a visual exclamation mark, but it wasn’t; it shifted with the hard muscle of her hip and fitted against her, quite simple and quite extraordinary. She didn’t rest a hand on it or fidget with it at all. It almost seemed to balance her.

Sherlock ran a thumb up and down the handle of the knife, watching Joan’s shoulders, the interesting, agreeable shape of her back, how it tapered slightly to her belted waist...stocky. Was she stocky? Sherlock wasn’t sure. Perhaps. There was a stunning solidity to her. A refusal to be anywhere but where she was. She filled her clothes quietly and efficiently and walked the same way. Stiff but unstrained. She was really cutting through the distance, heading for those targets Fairbanks had set up.

At half five in the morning. 

And why shoot at half five in the morning? Sherlock narrowed her eyes and felt curiosity crack open inside her.

It wasn’t that Joan needed the practice. Not at all. Joan could put a shot through the heart of any target she liked. She had let slip—and Sherlock was convinced that it had been an accident, because Joan kept such a skilful silence around any part of her life which wasn’t immediately visible that many people mistook her for normal—that she had used to win cigarettes in shooting galleries when she couldn’t afford to buy them. This must have been long after she had grown out of going to fairs with her father (whom she referred to—appallingly, but so Joanishly it was wonderful—as _her dad_ ). She had a lifetime of understanding firepower in her hands, and it showed as Sherlock watched her take her gun from its holster.

She weighed it easily in her hand, then loaded it and cocked it. Her entire body seemed to solidify behind it—Sherlock’s lips parted, purely on instinct—

Joan fired two shots. Two muted gunpowder cracks broke the quiet. A target—a human silhouette cut out of cardboard—swung and jerked twice.

Sherlock realised her eyes were dry with watching, and blinked urgently, feeling them sting. Her mouth, too, felt parched. Joan lowered her pistol and smiled. Sherlock shook her head, and looked away, giving her annoyance at being interested a chance to override her actual interest. Then she looked back, because her interest couldn’t be overpowered.

It was almost like watching the black Lysanders at RAF Tangmere had been. There was the same intimacy to watching—tinged cold with the knowledge that it would never be possible to see this if she were to watch openly. There was that same hunger for tiny, innocent details to press in deep inside of her and close up, and hold as her own, hers, not for anyone else’s perusal. And there was the same sense of vast, complicated connections and histories and criss-crossing circumstances twisting up and with a dancing elegance being expressed in one familiar movement: a hard-left landing; the angle of Joan’s arm as she raised her gun to shoot.

Sherlock stared hard. She wanted this to be imprinted on her mind. Khaki in the early sunlight, the morning quiet punctured by gunshots, Joan shooting alone. Detail. She needed detail, or she would never understand it. And her mouth was open again. But that was nothing; that was just her neglecting her body in order to focus on her mind. 

Joan fired another two shots, snapping the silence in short bursts. Sherlock’s nails were in her own palm, her breath hard. It was misting on the window now, she saw, though her face wasn’t too close to the pane. She rubbed it away with the heel of her hand, palm squeaking against the glass.

Joan was shoving a hand through her hair. She stood with her feet planted apart, her boots flat on the ground. In the distance, really, she looked like a toy soldier; androgynous, indistinct, except for the familiar rhythm of her movements. 

Steady. Joan was so steady. Sherlock had always hated steadiness. Mycroft was steady, with her hair set in its hard bronze curls and her cool, pitying smiles. The House was steady, with its labyrinthine dark wood and its engulfing chilliness—Mycroft was really just an extension of the House these days, anyway. She was more architecture than biology. Steadiness was stagnation; was teatimes spanning centuries; was her mother’s pearls.

Joan’s steadiness burned. Sometimes, after their fingers brushed—passing a cigarette, perhaps, or putting together one of the increasingly complex traps Carter was having them set—or after they grappled under Fairbanks’ watchful eye, each time going harder, faster, rougher—sometimes, Sherlock could feel her skin burn with the afterimage of Joan’s touch.

Sherlock’s face felt hot. Was she flushed? Her hand was damp with sweat. She wet her lips again. Joan dropped her hand, rolled her head on her shoulders—Sherlock’s hand, the one not on the knife, gripped hard at the side of the table, and she was awash, suddenly, in a hot, muddled confusion—

Joan shot, and Sherlock snatched her gaze away, breathed in hard through her nose. On the next gunshot she snatched up a potato to peel, her hand shuddering inexpertly and slicing off too much; but the next was perfect, and so was the next; and by the time she had finished the fourth, dropping it into the basin with a hard clang, she had no desire whatsoever to shove the window open, climb out and prowl over to her and demand to know what Joan was up to, and why she didn’t like to speak about her family, and exactly what mysterious girlfriend had she vanished off to Paris with and _what was her name_. 

Or anything like that.

To think, that Joan had once thrown everything off her shoulders, said _I don’t care_ to all the things which had tied her to England and left the country with some woman. It took Sherlock’s breath away. But she didn’t know anything about it, not even the meaningless details. 

Probably, Sherlock thought, fingers working roughly, quickly, probably the girlfriend was a Topsie or a Minnie or something equally stupid. She hoped so. And hoped not. Because—she hurled a newly-peeled potato onto the growing pile—because it would be humiliating, to, to _want_ someone who had once wanted a Topsie, a Bunny, a—

Her head was in her hands.

Like it wasn’t humiliating already. Like it wasn’t already intolerable. Something was in her throat. Intolerable. Her fingers unaccountably clumsy, she raised her face and pressed her hands shakily together in front of her mouth. Her eyes were closed, eyelashes fluttering. She breathed in. Intolerable. Another gunshot. Another. “Shut up,” she said aloud, but another came, and then one more because Joan was shooting in twos like she had been told to—because Fairbanks had explained, “One will probably kill a man; two definitely will.” Double-tap shooting, he had called it. Sherlock breathed in a lungful of cold air which tasted wrong. Whatever was in her throat spasmed.

There were no more shots. Sherlock stared up at the ceiling and didn’t dare look outside.

If a black Wolseley containing a mysteriously-late lady from one of various government offices concerned with archiving, statistics and general record-keeping had rolled up, she wouldn’t have noticed it. She wouldn’t have slipped out to intercept the woman before she got to the door; couldn’t have told her she could go right back and report to Miss Mycroft Holmes that everything was perfectly fine, thanks awfully. She would have been too distracted by the question of why Joan was shooting at this hour of the morning, and by the clean geometry of how she was doing it. The angles of her, the shapes. The lines.

The thought of—beyond all that clean trigonometry, or, no, happening concurrently—the folds of Joan’s uniform, warm from her body, the sweat gathering on her skin, the shift of her bootsoles against the grass and the curl of her toes inside them, the warm square angles of her bright, open face.

Sherlock lowered her hands and opened her eyes, preparing to search the dingy ceiling for answers to the whole multitude of questions that that fact raised. Instead, she made a strangled noise, eyes widening yet further.

It wasn’t the fact that Molly was there, just a strip of her visible between the door and the frame, clutching a plate of eggs and toast and a tin mug. It was the fact that Sherlock hadn’t even noticed her.

“Sorry!” Molly said, flushing bright red. Sherlock swiftly reached up and snatched off her borrowed white headscarf in order to lessen her resemblance to a pining kitchen maid, suddenly faintly disgusted by everything around her. Disgusted by herself, in fact. She felt greasy, char-smudged, adolescent. “I thought—since you’re working over breakfast—which I don’t think is fair at all, by the way, I think it’s rotten that Bannager—”

“It wasn’t Bannager’s idea and I know what you’re here for,” Sherlock said, voice like a succession of heavy, angry thumps, each syllable fast, dull, hard. “I don’t want toast, Molly.”

“You _do_ want tea,” Molly insisted, and Sherlock focused on the tin mug in her hands. It wasn’t Sherlock’s mug; it was Molly’s. She felt a mixture of revulsion, appreciation and sheer craving. Slowly, she sat back, falling silent, and Molly took it as reluctant acceptance. Sherlock watched her elbow her way awkwardly through the door, and thinned out her lips at the breakfast which she deposited on the table. She reached for the tea and the tea alone.

“Why are you working so early?” Molly asked timidly, not sitting down.

“Freeing up my evening,” Sherlock muttered into her tea. “Carter’s fulfilling his promise tonight. The pub.”

“Oh! I completely forgot. Well, you ought to watch you get enough sleep. That trek Bannager’s been threatening us with all month is tomorrow.”

“Come with us and keep us in order, then.”

“D’you think I’m still invited?”

“I invited you in the first place and I’ve just done it again,” Sherlock said impatiently. “So yes, I should think so.”

Molly flushed. Sherlock watched Molly’s breakfast—it had to be—cool in front of her, and drank her tea. They stayed silent, Molly still not sitting down, but hovering upright like a very nervous butler.

“When I came in, you looked,” Molly started, and Sherlock interrupted her with, “Eat your breakfast. I don’t want it. I didn’t look like anything. I was thinking.”

Too many sentences, each ending too awkwardly. Stopping and starting. A lurching quality to her voice. She felt like she had been woken from a deep sleep, struggling to make sense of the shapes of the world around her. The smell of the food was faintly nauseating; normally, that wouldn’t have been anything worth remarking upon, but with her bodily chemistry still unpredictable from cutting out the pills, she was suddenly afraid she might end up running to the sink.

No, it wasn’t just that. She couldn’t—count on herself anymore.

Molly sat down opposite Sherlock and started on her toast, frowning. For a moment, Sherlock was pleased, and then felt the irritating suspicion that Molly was using eating as convenient cover, disguising her real aim of angling her concerned look right into Sherlock’s face.

Cover. She kept coming back to that. Apt cover.

Two shots rang out, and Sherlock almost inhaled her tea, eyes fluttering closed, her knuckles going white on the handle. “Joan,” she murmured, almost admonishingly, as if Joan could hear her to be chastised.

“She’s terribly good at that, isn’t she?” Molly said, and Sherlock opened her eyes to look at her suspiciously. She was struck, abruptly, by how good Molly would be in France. There was nothing of her to look at, really. She passed through one’s field of vision and never made a lasting impression. It was misleading. She might be invisible, but she wasn’t intangible.

“Her father taught her,” Sherlock said.

“Actually, with a pistol, it was her friend’s brother.”

Sherlock put down her mug. It clinked. “I know,” she snapped. “That much was obvious.” Of course, Joan had learnt to shoot a pistol somewhere other than shooting galleries at fairs, though the basics of aim and hand-eye coordination had doubtlessly been instilled in her there; of course, it would naturally belong to the part of her life which she tried to deny, the part of her life which had been spent in France...

Why was she so angry, suddenly? Sherlock didn’t know. Neither did Molly, who was flushed, and didn’t look likely to start talking again.

It just didn’t seem right that Sherlock had deduced where Joan had learned to shoot a pistol, while Molly, apparently, had heard.

Sherlock looked out of the window. Joan was still there; further away, now, inspecting a target. She had put her gun back in its holster. Sherlock flexed her fingers and felt a spike of angry confusion. “Why is everyone missing breakfast today?” she wondered aloud, a sneer rippling in her voice. Molly didn’t answer. “Look at that,” Sherlock continued. Her throat felt tight. “She’s so quiet, calm...hateful, isn’t it.”

“Have you had a falling-out?” Molly asked. It didn’t sound surprised. It sounded, in fact, like that was what she had been coming to ask in the first place, offering breakfast and tea as—apt cover.

Sherlock turned her face slowly towards her. Moving like a machine. She blinked once. “No,” she said.

“Only I thought, after last night—”

Sherlock thought about Joan’s fingers hovering near her mouth. Thought about those fingers wrapped around the grip of a gun. Lowered her mug without drinking. “No.”

“Right. Well. I’m glad. Look, I should really get back, I’ve left Sally on her own with Anderson—”

“He _will_ be pleased,” she murmured.

“Yes, but even you like Sally more than Anderson. And he’s terrible, never letting up, it’s—terrible. Look, Sherlock, you look—you look very— _penitent_ , so—”

“What?”

“You,” Molly said helplessly, “sitting here, missing breakfast. In, in the apron and the headscarf, which I saw, I’m sorry, I just—I thought maybe you might be avoiding Joan or trying to...work something out of yourself, you know, trying not to think or trying to give yourself a hard time or both, and you looked really sort of ill when I came in, so—”

“Is that the sort of thing people do?” Sherlock asked incredulously. “Work things out of themselves?”

Another two shots rang out. Molly looked towards the window. Meaningfully. Sherlock blinked, and said, “Oh.”

So that was why everybody was missing breakfast.

“She might just be practising,” Molly admitted, “but, you know, she does actually like sleeping in quite a bit.”

“Yes.”

“So I thought perhaps she was—”

“Molly.”

“Sorry.”

“No,” Sherlock said, “no, it’s. Thank you.” Molly blinked at her, then shook her head. “And,” Sherlock added, “you’ve left your cap on. You’re indoors. Don’t do that.”

* * *

Strange, after that, how the day seemed to move in uneven stops and starts. Close combat training was nothing but a jumble of limbs and heavy thuds; Sherlock spent it practising on dummies and with Sally. In the barn, even the light seemed staggered, thin, unreliable. She just about caught Fairbanks saying, “Lovely footwork, Holmes,” and then all of a sudden she was on her back, then smearing the blade of her knife with lipstick in order to analyse the stains left over on the dummies, then demonstrating to Gregson how to turn a handshake into a stab to the stomach because Fairbanks had deputised her while he was busy answering Molly’s polite questions about spinal dislocation.

All through it, she was conscious of Joan, standing on the opposite side of the barn and going through repeated motions of disarming a sentry, frustrated because she couldn’t get it perfectly every time, though Sherlock could attest to her performance being more than serviceable. She just seemed to be fixated on it, rehearsing and rehearsing. They hadn’t spoken since the night before. Watching her from the corner of her eye, Sherlock was suddenly tempted to count the hours, then swiftly stopped herself.

Joan groaned, muttered, “Once more, I’ll get it,” her voice muted by distance, and her partner, a dark-haired Lieutenant almost twice her height, looked visibly nervous.

Working something out of herself, perhaps.

Because Sherlock had been so focused on hearing Joan’s murmur, Sally’s voice seemed painfully loud and close when she sighed, “Can’t do anything if you don’t pay attention, Sherlock,” with more weariness than venom. Sherlock blinked herself back into the realities of space, time and her body, and then—attention diverted from Joan—immediately lost track of all three once more as she plunged back into the exercises Fairbanks had set them.

Without the distraction of Joan’s proximity, the rhythm of struggling, lashing out, darting back, brought her back, strangely innocently, to school, where her _difficulty_ —as everyone had phrased it, very delicately—had been fighting. She had spent the first fourteen years of her life either brawling or suffering the consequences: bloody lips, torn fingernails, black eyes, broken bones, the despair of her mother. It had never, really, been for any reason. Boredom, perhaps; restlessness, maybe. “Why do you _do_ it, Sherlock?” Mummy would ask, her face like the moon in a pool of water; ghostly and shifting and barely there. But beautiful of course. And sometimes wet; sometimes, her eyes would be pink and damp, and her cheeks would gleam, and she would clutch a handkerchief.

Sherlock wouldn’t know what to say, but it didn’t really matter. Mummy wasn’t asking a specific question. When she said, “Why do you _do_ it?” she was referring not just to fighting, but to everything Sherlock did which she didn’t understand; which was everything Sherlock did.

Fairbanks was finishing up, calling for people to step away from their partners, put away any knives they had been practising with. The noise ricocheted off the walls of the barn. Sherlock took a step back from Sally, but instead of heading for the door, walked over to the dummy she had been slaughtering earlier—or rather, walked over to Joan, who was inspecting it.

The dummy was roughly in the shape of a man, suspended from the rafters and turning gently, swinging; a plain, white, rather doughy shape, with plenty of stitches and fresh gashes, though they were discouraged from too much actual stabbing. Now, the dummy was smeared with red along what passed for throat and belly.

Sherlock stopped just behind Joan, close enough that she could feel the way her shoulders moved as she breathed. The barn was fast emptying, the clatter and human mutter of the students echoing and re-echoing through the hot, leathery air. Fairbanks counted the knives returned, then swore—it bounced off the walls—and strode out of the barn to reclaim some carried-off weapon. “Alright, chaps, hand it over—”

The door closed; the world was muted. They were alone. And Joan was breathing, trembling, her blood pulsing, beating beneath her skin: tiny, beautiful movements disguised, to the rest of the world, as stillness.

Sherlock pitied the rest of the world very much.

“It’s hard to analyse while in the middle of things,” she murmured after a moment, her voice coming in a low, private hum, stirring the hairs just above Joan’s ear. She felt how Joan tensed. “I put the lipstick on the knife so I could get a better look at where exactly I was hitting and how.”

“I get that,” Joan replied, just as quietly. “Just...”

“It’s not very realistic.”

“What?”

“If the reality of what we’re being trained to do has just sunk in,” Sherlock said, “this is not a very realistic facsimile. Blood isn’t that colour. Nor does it well up that way.”

Joan turned her head, raised her eyebrows. “I know that,” she said, her voice very frank, laughing. She was close, her face tilted towards Sherlock’s, so that Sherlock was suddenly aware of the fine golden down brushed over Joan’s cheeks, the beads of sweat glinting in her eyebrows, the pink tinge spreading along her neck. “Just—you don’t wear lipstick.”

Sometimes, Sherlock felt slow next to her. There was something private and smiling in the blue light of Joan’s gaze, though her mouth was a straight line. Sherlock narrowed her eyes. “We’re in the middle of a war,” she pointed out very quietly, suddenly with real accusation, real confusion, “and you’re paying attention to my mouth,” and she, too, was paying attention to Joan’s; and it didn’t make sense. None of it.

Joan blinked, surprise flashing through her like a current which she quickly shut off, and she said, “Right, well, actually—” in her pretending, calm, normal voice, stepping off and wetting her lips and Sherlock suddenly stepped forwards, ready to do something reckless—

—Joan’s lips parted—

—Fairbanks poked his head through to door to drawl, “I don’t care either way, ladies, but the Major may just kick you off the course if you miss a run. His particular fancy, you know.”

“Yessir,” they snapped together, Joan turning and bracing up on instinct and Sherlock following Joan’s lead because she couldn’t spare the brainpower to direct her body in anything but an echo. Her mind was much too occupied with other things: the idea of Joan’s eyes on her mouth—Joan’s eyes on a target—Joan _looking at her mouth_.

From Fairbanks’ expression as they passed, Sherlock’s sudden knowledge of and adherence to military custom was the only thing which alarmed him about the scene he had disturbed. Sherlock only spared him a glance, then stared forwards as she walked mechanically out into the sunlight, blinking over and over.

She had resolved to kiss Joan, she realised as she trudged onwards—her mouth slack, her hearing somehow muffled and the world uncomfortably bright, the grass livid with sun and tipping under her feet. There had been so little air between them, so little space. And she had resolved to kiss her.

The resolution had slipped away, claimed by the filmy grey tides of time and the suddenly untraversable distance between them—but the instinct, the urge, was still burning in Sherlock's chest, completely undeniable.

After the terror came dizzy relief. 

The next thing which registered was Bannager snarling something in her face about pacing herself, calling her a ruddy show-off. She resurfaced at lunch after that, sharing a cigarette with Joan on the steps out front, surrounded by their fellow students, all with cigarettes in hand, all enjoying the sunshine. Lighting, stealing, sharing, drawing, passing, laughing. And not speaking—but not forgetting either.

Reassured by the presence of others, unable to wander accidentally into more dangerous territory, there was a kind of pleasure in leaving everything unspoken, to heat the air between them but never come to boil. At least Sherlock thought so. And it seemed to last an age, each awkward brush of fingers as they passed the cigarette between them standing out as a historical event, their eyes meeting and then un-meeting, the laughter of men in the background somehow serving as a kind of protective wall around their own bubble of silence. Sherlock watched smoke escape Joan’s lips, and followed it with her gaze all the way up to the eternal blue sky. 

Then all of a sudden she was slammed back in the scullery, scrubbing her hands raw, washing up after lunch, scrubbing so hard and so fast that she was reminded again of what Molly had said earlier about _working something out of herself_. After that, suddenly again, she was with Carter, arguing automatically about grenades, then there was an obstacle course—she remembered only a flash of it, Joan’s shoulders working under her jacket, straining the material—then she was sniping with Sally over dinner.

All through it, Sherlock thought: Joan doesn’t understand, then. Joan doesn’t understand either.

It wasn’t like the black Lysanders at all. It wasn’t like Harding holding all his cards to his chest and refusing to trust her even while she did, or prepared to do, his dirty work. It wasn’t even like Mycroft, with her concerned phone calls and her cold pity, her way of suggesting no matter where she was that she was the only adult in the room. Joan didn’t understand either.

It shouldn’t have been comforting. She wanted, almost desperately, to know what this was, what was happening, when they shared cigarettes and when Joan’s fingers wavered dangerously close to Sherlock’s mouth. Joan, surely, should have been able to explain. But she wasn’t. She was out at five in the morning, shooting cardboard cutouts of men to death. Restless.

And if nobody knew the answer, then nobody was holding the answer to ransom. 

Joan, too, had that unpronounceable feeling trapped inside her chest.

Evening came like a long sigh and Sherlock was plunged into the mingled smells of burnt hair, powder, perfume: the scents which rolled thick in the women’s room as all of them prepared to go out. There were cars and trucks arranged to bring them down to the village. Sally had agreed to come, as Sherlock had suspected she eventually would. Joan, however, was absent from this session of primping, saying that she had promised one of the drivers that she would give her a hand fixing up her engine.

It was, Sherlock thought, rather cunning of Joan to come up with an excuse like that for turning up in battle dress, her hair uncurled and combed back. 

Sherlock picked her way over to where a truck was rumbling, stationary in the dark, its headlights thinned out by blackout regulations. In what traces of light there were, she could just make out the shape of Joan bending at the window, her weight on one hip, her voice a faint collection of syllables fading in and out on the wind; Sherlock caught the sound of, “...middle of a raid, so...” She couldn’t fail to spot how carefully Joan had wiped the oil from her hands, and how her hair gleamed very slightly, where she had been flattening it and combing it with wet fingers. Her mouth curved upwards, something expanding in her chest.

“Joan,” she said, and Joan stiffened, rolled her head on her shoulders—just like she had when Sherlock had been watching her shoot from the scullery—and turned slightly, still keeping one hand braced against the truck.

“Jesus,” Sherlock heard her mutter.

“I thought I’d prove you wrong,” Sherlock said tartly, feeling her lipstick slippery on her mouth, feeling Joan’s stare on her lips like either a kiss or a smack. “Coming?”

“Yes,” said Joan, quietly, precisely, and Sherlock swung around and headed for the back of the truck, clambering inside. In the pitch blackness, she could detect Sally from the smell of her singed hair and Molly from her excessive perfume, and then there was the rhythm of male breathing. Anderson, of all people, and Gregson along with him. “Who invited you along? Oh, no, don’t—I don’t actually want to know—” Her own voice was far from her. Everything was thick in the dark, noisy, but nothing could drown out how her heart was beating in almost a continuous scream. She was amazed no one had commented on it. Joan was crashing along behind her, being absurdly loud. Thumping and banging, impossible not to take notice of. 

Sherlock wedged herself in between Sally and Joan and closed her eyes for a moment, conscious of Joan’s thigh pressed tight against hers and wanting to think of nothing else for a few glorious moments. But the door was pushed open again with a rolling clang and the bright, fizzing light of a torch invaded.

“There are too many of you in here,” Carter announced from behind the beam, sounding aggrieved. “Anderson, who invited you?”

“Donovan,” Anderson protested, just as Sally started protesting that she hadn’t. Carter shook his head and swung the beam to Sherlock, so that the world flashed bright white. She narrowed her eyes, refusing to duck away or scowl.

“Holmes,” Carter said. “Up and out. You can come in the car with me.”

“Lucky for some,” Sally said, but Sherlock barely heard her. The light was searing her eyes, and she set her jaw.

Sherlock allowed herself one moment in which to think: _damn!_

Then the world was suddenly very simple and very hard. She stood up and smoothed down her skirt, then navigated her way out of the truck, ignoring how Joan had gone stiff and tense beside her, obviously not liking the situation but not actually saying anything. Carter put an unwelcome hand on her arm to help her down, and slammed the door behind them. 

He didn’t move his hand after; just kept steering her onwards. They passed the driver of the truck, checking her hair in a compact, and he nodded at her; she sat up straighter, pocketed the compact and put the truck into gear. The noise was vast in the night.

God, Sherlock thought, quite calmly and with some dark satisfaction, he had made a mistake doing this now.

She had had plans. She hadn’t known, exactly, what they had been, but she had had them. They had involved alcoholic carelessness and leaning her knee against Joan’s beneath the table; they had involved going back early, getting Joan to join her—something, something like that, _she_ didn’t know, and not knowing had been as potently exciting as it was terrifying—but now all that was called off, and she wasn’t inclined to be forgiving.

There was a car waiting, and a FANY in its driver’s seat, but although Carter steered her to it he didn’t make any move to open the doors. They stopped behind it. Sherlock was standing between the boot and his body. With a rush, she let out her breath, distantly surprised to notice that she had been holding it.

He lined up their eyes and turned off his torch. Plunged into night-blindness, Sherlock did the calculations; Carter’s night vision would be just as ill-adjusted as hers for a few seconds, probably longer considering his age, but when his eyes were fully adjusted he would have what light emanated from the open door of the house behind him, and would be able to pick out the details of her face. To her, he would be faceless.

“Very clever, Holmes,” he said quietly. “Very clever indeed.” 

“I really don’t know what you mean, sir,” Sherlock said, and a savage thrill pulsed through her at how anger seemed to crackle darkly in the air between them, palpable even though she couldn’t see Carter’s face.

“Yes, you do.”

The rumble of the car’s engine behind them seemed to vibrate through the ground. Sherlock planted her feet firmly there in the dark, thinking: _steady_ , though it was a mistake; it made her think of Joan.

“You challenged us to plant a pull-switch somewhere, Captain. I accept that placing it in your office was perhaps inappropriate, but really—”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, Holmes.” She could feel warmth coming off him. It wasn’t comforting and she didn’t care. “Rifling through my desk, making ’phone calls, flirting with that rider... Listen to me, very carefully.” He breathed in and out slowly. “I won’t pretend I think you care about what the punishment for spying on communications regarding the movement of British military personnel abroad _should_ be. And I won’t pretend I think you’re important enough to warrant said punishment, because the fact is that you’re one of hundreds of arrogant, over-educated children that pass through these training schools every few months. You don’t have any purpose but to cause trouble, which makes you somewhat less than negligible. But if you put a toe out of line from now on, Holmes, if you _waver_ , I will personally recommend you for domestic duty as a blasted secretary to some official in Personnel down in Baker Street and you can see what you can deduce from typing up reports on the quality of training school canteens all day. I will see it _done_. And you will never, never see the light of day again after that posting, because all you will do—I know your type—is disobey, and disobey, and disobey until you drop further, and further bloody still.”

Sherlock closed her eyes.

Three seconds. She would have three seconds in which to breathe. She counted them, holding herself steady. And then she smiled.

“Oh, dear, Captain,” she said. “Poor show.” 

He was stiff, narrowing his eyes at her—all but baring his teeth. She drank it in, breathed it deep, and felt herself come together, come to a point, solidify. 

“For one thing,” she said, “if you had left it, I might actually have believed you worked it out yourself, and decided, quite rightly, to be lenient and make no mention of it. But instead Harding rang you up just recently, didn’t he? And he told you I must have gotten something from your desk. And you blew it by confronting me. It happened weeks ago, Captain.”

Carter didn’t respond, and Sherlock’s satisfaction swelled, almost crushing the breath from her chest. She thought of Joan, in the back of the van, being carried through the night, and used the flare of cheated anger to drive herself onwards. “It would be wrong to say Harding’s lied to you,” she continued, “but he hasn’t told you the whole story and, faced with gaps, you’ve filled in what makes sense to you. It’s wrong. All of it. But best of all, while Harding, you and I are all banking on the information we possess, Bannager possesses _no information at all_.” She _felt_ him tense. It made her lips peel back from her teeth for a moment. “That is right, isn’t it? Or you wouldn’t have cornered me in the dark. You would have sent me up to his office in the daytime hours and trusted his distaste for me to do the rest.”

“Do you think this isn’t serious just because it’s not perfectly cleared with the nearest Major?”

“No. I think you’re aware of what a view Bannager might take of you organising deals with Harding, receiving riders at the lodge, without once mentioning it to him.”

He was silent for a beat too long. Sherlock could feel how tightly his teeth were gritted. “You have no idea what the consequences of you meddling in this might be,” he said finally. “Not just for you.”

“No,” said Sherlock, “it’s not that, it’s that I _don’t care_. And neither do you when it comes down to it. You aren’t British military personnel abroad, and neither am I.”

She was pressing for him to say _you will be soon_ , to give her the satisfaction of being completely, unquestionably right, but instead he prickled and said, “You might think that you don’t really live on the face of this world, so you don’t have to expect any kind of retribution. But your friend does.”

Sherlock’s eyes flicked upwards from the dark mass that was Carter’s face, and glanced up to the stars. In her mind, Joan said _Jesus_. Yes. Joan lived on the face of this world. It was why Sherlock liked her. It was why she was so dangerous, and in so much danger. 

“I wouldn’t bother, Captain,” Sherlock said. “My _friend_ is entirely capable of looking after herself.”

Their breathing was even, matched. For a long time, that and the ticking of the engine was all that disturbed the evening air.

“Dismissed,” said Carter.

Sherlock didn’t allow herself to hurry back to the house; just took quick, measured steps until her hand found the door and she could slip into the entrance hall and _stop_.

It was galling to stand there with the door closed behind her when she had been promised one evening of welcome change—but all the same, tearing through him had felt good, after the storm-tossed uncertainty which the day had otherwise consisted of.

She couldn’t go to bed. She couldn’t be on her own. She felt too savage still, too angry and too pleased. She would tear herself to shreds. She started walking instead, striding through the chilly corridors in her lipstick and heels and the only pair of silk stockings she owned which weren’t in tatters.

In a room which had once been a study she found a group of six RAF men playing cards for service cigarettes, so she sat down with them and cheated them out of all their smokes with a hardness her thin smile barely bothered to hide. One told her she looked pretty out of uniform, and she told him his girlfriend was faithful despite his suspicions, so he shouldn’t be so eager to get back at her for imagined offences. The spasm his face went through made her smile sharpen and her stomach churn with smug disgust, and she lit an ill-gotten cigarette to help force down the urge to go around the room: your mother’s dying and you don’t care, your brother thinks you hate his wife but in fact you hate the fact that you’re alone, you’ve had enough of this spy nonsense and you want to go back to your old posting. Counting cards had been more challenging.

Bad idea, of course, to alienate them before they offered her alcohol. She breathed in smoke and imagined Joan, being steady, looking at her from across the room and saying _it’s fine_ with her eyes, her whole face, her whole body. Her whole body...

Finally a Pilot Officer brought out the black-market whiskey he had stocked up on in Inverness. They were laughing about the long trek which Bannager had promised them tomorrow, all of them swearing blind they never got hangovers. “Joining us, Aircraftwoman?” “Yes.” Perfunctory. They had given up on trying to peel her out of her last silk stockings, and now she was an oddity, making the atmosphere strange. Their discomfort with her was a ripple in the air, and she picked up on it with pleasure. She sprawled on a dusty sofa, watching them as they imitated a Lieutenant on the course named Streetham, swinging their limbs and laughing. Their voices were schoolboyish and unearthly, washing over her as she swallowed whiskey from a tin mug.

Joan’s whole...

“...most bizarre display of...”

“Perfectly ridiculous man.”

Sherlock had lost track of who they were talking about, but she enjoyed listening to them, their voices sinking and rising, frothing at the edge of her hearing, occasionally giving her an excuse to smirk or bringing on a superior flush of brief, pleasurable disdain, forgotten in seconds. She finished the whiskey and leaned back, her head not spinning but rolling as if she were at sea. It was no Nembutal, but it wasn’t bad; that pleasant heaviness of her limbs was familiar. She stared up at the ceiling, and wondered suddenly if Joan would want to know where she was, and why she hadn’t come with Carter after all. It was a given that Joan would work out what had happened, Joan not being nearly as stupid as Sherlock sometimes suspected she might want to be. The real question was what Joan would do, and how Sherlock should react.

She was sitting up, and the room was a boat on a rolling ocean. To think she might drown with this awful lot and their tiny personal dramas scrawled all over their faces. To think she might have joined their ranks, at least as far as personal dramas went.

Christ! No, better, more military: damn! Fuck! Shit! For a few moments, she listlessly rehearsed every curse she could think of, vaguely disdainful of all of them.

But this was her life, and if she had ruined it, then so be it. If she was about to ruin it, then so be it.

“What are you thinking, Holmes?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

She wondered if there was more whiskey going. The Flight Sergeant she had accused of being excessively suspicious of his girlfriend was sitting down beside her, putting a hand tentatively out to touch her arm. He wasn’t flirting. His expression was that of a man consulting an oracle. She blinked hard, trying to get him to resolve into one clear, unswaying image. “Are you sure?” he was asking, turned meek and nervous. “About Josie—that’s my girl’s name, Josie.”

“Yes,” Sherlock said irritably, taking her arm away from him and straightening her collar vaguely. “Yes. Your—your cigarette case, it’s all obvious. Do...” She swallowed, frowned, and said, “Do something about it,” not really talking to him at all.

So be it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you! The next chapter will arrive on Monday 2nd September.
> 
>  **"GC &CS"** \- GC&CS were most associated with Bletchley Park during the war, so that's essentially what's on offer for Sherlock here. In a much, much earlier version of this story, she actually worked at BP for a time, though not as a cryptographer; I was intrigued by stories of teleprinter operators whose job it was to decode five characters at a time and then send the decoded versions along to be translated from German, and had this vision of Sherlock piecing together messages from the five characters in front of her and the glimpses she kept getting of everybody else's characters/the noise of their teleprinter machines. ...This didn't happen, obviously! For Reasons. But there you go.
> 
>  **"Thirty six [wpm]"** \- Modern-day Morse enthusiasts will likely not be impressed by this speed, but modern-day Morse enthusiasts also probably know that during WWII, Morse was transmitted using a straight key (that's the traditional up-and-down key you see in all the films) annnnnd that...the world record for copying Morse using a straight key is 35wpm. In other words: Sherlock could be exaggerating, but even if she is (and let's face it, it's Sherlock Holmes, she could be that good) she's REALLY FAST ANYWAY.
> 
>  **"a fit...playing around with her medication"** \- Barbiturate withdrawal is a horrible thing and can be fatal if untreated; it can cause things from nausea to hallucinations right up to seizures. Hence why, when Sherlock is actually coming off Nembutal, she's doing it slowly. (...Although not exactly perfectly safely, but. You know.)
> 
>  **"smearing the blade of her knife with lipstick"** \- ...allow me to groan quietly. This was a real thing really done by a female SOE agent in training, and I believe she said that she had been perfectly fine all the way through before she took a look at the red stain on the dummy's neck and everything hit her all at once. ...I cannot for the life of me remember her name or where I heard this. IF I DISCOVER THESE THINGS, I will update this.
> 
> EDITED TO ADD: the SOE agent in question was Virginia Hall, and I remembered it wrongly! While she did smear her knife with lipstick to check her accuracy, she was practicing with a fellow student; seeing him with the red streaked across his neck was what disturbed her.
> 
> ...also, yes. I'm on time. Well, sort of; it's three minutes into Tuesday for me right now. I hang my head in embarrassment at making such a fuss. Still, pleased that I got this (bloody fucking argghhhh) chapter out into the world on time, and LONG MAY IT STAY THERE. Begone from my head and my open tabs, Chapter Nine.


	10. Jump!

“Come on, last day,” Joan had said to the mess of soft dark curls obscuring Sherlock’s pillow and most of her face that morning; but it wasn’t until now, being rattled along potholed lanes in the Scottish Highlands in the back of a boiling hot truck, her knee knocking against Sherlock’s at every bump, that she realised properly what that meant.

Unlike Harding, who had always been talking of the future—the next stage in training, the next section of the course—Bannager barely spoke at all, and certainly didn’t consider it his duty to give hints about where they might expect to be moved should they pass through Swordland Lodge.

Where next, Joan—didn’t know. It couldn’t be, wouldn’t be France—could it? After just two months of preparation, most of it PT—without their destination having been officially confirmed to them? She glanced over at Sherlock, as if somehow Sherlock would have the answers, but her profile revealed nothing; she was staring with a dreamy thoughtfulness straight ahead of her, ignoring all else.

In fact, Joan thought with a slight smile, she looked unfairly composed for someone who had to be completely hungover.

She and Sally had left the pub after a single pint each, leaving Molly making shy conversation and accepting drinks from a bashful Pilot Officer named Gregson whom Joan only knew vaguely as being one of the men she had silently killed under Fairbanks’ watchful eye. Sally had been bored, uncomfortable, annoyed with Anderson’s new habit of gazing woefully in her direction; Joan had been uneasy, and unable to stop wondering what Carter had done to make Sherlock want to stay in.

She had been thinking, too, of Sherlock's lipstick.

Vanessa obligingly drove them back early—where they had discovered Sherlock apparently passed out, curled up in her clothes atop the sheets of her bed. Joan’s stomach had dropped, and she had felt Sally stiffen beside her.

But then Sherlock had lifted her head and muttered, “Resting my eyes,” which was funny enough to loosen the tension slightly. Though she more or less got across the idea that she had been drinking with the RAF boys in lieu of coming to the pub, and that she was really quite impressed by their whiskey, she wasn’t exactly in a state for long conversations. Nor had she been chatty at breakfast today. She’d just frowned down into her tea and seemed more preoccupied than anything.

“Homer Unit!” Bannager snapped, and the present slammed back into place. Joan got up, struggling to the doors of the truck, knowing that the only chance she had of doing this was to do it quickly—

—she shoved open the doors, and made sure to roll as she hit the ground.

The air was still and hot but fresher than it had been in the truck, and for a moment she was staring straight up with the sun whiting out her vision, ears full of the whining of midges and the splutter of the truck as it rumbled off. She pushed herself up, her head reeling and her palms gritted against the rough ground, and looked around.

And laughed. “You are _not_ part of Homer Unit,” she said to Sherlock, who was getting to her feet, dusting off the knees of her khaki battle dress. “Are you?”

“No,” said Sherlock, shrugging. “I’m Iliad, but so is Mathews. And Streetham, for that matter. I’d rather not.”

“You’re not meant to know,” Joan insisted, struggling up from the dirt track and looking about at the rest of the unit. They had been separated into five teams of four, each taking a random slip of paper with a unit name on it and being told to keep their assignation secret until the moment Bannager called their name and they had to vacate the truck just as they had been instructed. Homer constituted five, now that Sherlock had thrown her lot in rather than be stranded with Mathews and the not-entirely-blameless Streetham. With them, slowly unfolding themselves from the ground, were Anderson, Molly and Gregson.

“Right,” Joan said, and Anderson immediately interrupted her with, “ _I_ have seniority of rank here, Corporal.”

Joan nodded, her fingertips rubbing with a faint vexation one of her raised brows. Sherlock gave an almost inaudible snort.

This, then, was the trek Bannager had promised them at the end of the month. It looked set to be something more than just a hike. Each unit had been deposited a good day’s walk away from Swordland Lodge and told to get back to the house as quickly as possible. No map; no compass. No one had complained that the exercise would be unfair depending on where a particular unit got dumped. Everyone was grimly aware that between the heat, the hills and the fast-running streams which sliced through the landscape in unpredictable slashes, there wasn’t such thing as an easy route.

“You’re compromising all of us,” Gregson was saying to Sherlock. “Bannager’s going to disqualify us all because you just want to tag around after Watson all the—”

“Oh, leave her alone,” Molly said, her voice high and angry. “She didn’t want to be with Mathews, she just said. He broke her tooth, you know. Be fair.”

The shock of hearing Molly tell someone off might have been more effective than what she actually said. Either way, Gregson blinked, and shut up. Anderson snorted, finally, as if to indicate that he didn’t think much of anyone in the unit. And Joan said, “Right, if we’re done bickering, we need to move. Sher—” No, they were on an operation. “Holmes?”

“North by northwest,” said Sherlock immediately, “which is _that_ way,” and Joan said, “Thank you.”

“You see,” said Molly, and Sherlock gave her a surprised look which Molly didn’t catch. Joan saw it fall between them.

“I’m in charge here,” Anderson snapped, but set off north by northwest anyway. Gregson and Molly fell into step behind him, while Sherlock and Joan settled into a rhythm behind all of them. Even so, Joan could feel Sherlock’s slight impatience at having to adjust her pace.

The air was hot and damp, and clouds of midges swirled in their path, thrown up by the nearby loch. There was a smell of rot and dust, and the stink of sweat, but also the bright, tangled smell of greenery blooming wild in the heat. Gregson was apologising shamefacedly to Molly, who blushed uncomfortably as she accepted it, and Anderson was too intent on his own leadership to pay much attention to the people he was leading. Joan finally decided that she and Sherlock had privacy enough to speak, and asked, “Where next?” Sherlock opened her mouth— “No,” Joan said quickly, knowing that she was about to start discussing a route back to Swordland Lodge. “I mean what happens next, if we get through this.”

Sherlock stayed silent for a few moments, strolling onwards with her hands linked behind her back. “Back down south,” she predicted finally. “The interviews were in London, weren’t they? I assume that’s where this organisation is based.”

“You think that’ll be the last of it?”

“I think they’re idiots if they keep that murdered man waiting for much longer. Then again—” she raised her eyebrows up at the sun; her hair was ineffectually held back by a blue silk scarf, more to break the rules than because it was practical, and the thick damp sunlight was turning her escaped curls almost reddish-brown “—I think they’re idiots.”

“Of course you do,” said Joan, smiling.

“I don’t think Harding’s been mouthing off about the job he gave me, of course,” Sherlock added. “But he’s in charge of training—”

“He is?”

“Yes, of course. Training and probably more. He’s aware of the details of goings-on in France; doesn’t seem like something just any instructor would be party to. Not like Carter, playing guessing games...”

“Oh?”

Sherlock waved her away and just carried on; she had evidently scripted her own thoughts on the matter and didn’t plan on deviating. “Harding obviously frequently commutes between Wanborough and London, and has more on his plate than just that single training school—come on, you were in his office too, surely you could see?”

Joan’s negative answer was interrupted by Anderson snapping back at them, “Could you please gossip elsewhere, ladies?” Sherlock snorted and suggested he listen in, he might learn something; and Joan looked away, and thought about France.

After two months of what felt almost like a strange kind of boarding school—obstacle courses, sneaking around in the night, listening to lectures in French about politics and what their instructors called _le mode de vie français_ so consistently and so frequently that Sally, when teased out of her shell, could do a perfect imitation of the phrase and the lilting intonation in which it was always spoken—after months of what felt like playing at soldiers, the idea of going to France seemed incongruous.

It wasn’t, Joan thought, that she was afraid. Her eagerness was as vivid and aching as it had been that day in Harding’s office in May. And now that Sherlock had broken open the seal which Joan had previously placed upon her memories of Paris and Persie, it was all the more urgent. It was just startling to discover that it looked like there wouldn’t be a moment where Joan felt that she knew what she was meant to be doing. That she wouldn’t wake up one day and think _right, I’m a British agent now_. She had thought, for some reason, that becoming that—being a spy—would mean some kind of submersion of her original identity, so that she could focus on being a spy without the clutter of being Joan Watson getting in the way.

As it turned out, she had just ended up becoming Joan Watson, but with added complications. The thought actually made her smile—rueful, crooked, and brief, but there. _Typical_.

One of said complications was, of course, Sherlock—or, no. Was that fair? To call her a mere complication to Joan's sense of self? No, Joan decided; no.

While her mind was on her, she lingered behind, enough that she could watch Sherlock without Sherlock watching her. Sherlock made her job easier by pushing past Molly and Gregson to argue with Anderson. She had consented to wear khaki at some point during their later days at Wanborough, and Joan still wasn’t quite over how aristocratic and long-limbed it made her look. Her skinny white wrists shot out from the sleeves of her shirt, and her hips jolted smoothly side to side with a lazy animal swiftness as she kept pace with Anderson. Joan caught the words, “That would be an excellent point, Lieutenant, if that were north,” floating back through the humid air.

The future, Joan thought, the future was occupied territory; and she closed her mind to it, inhaled the dust and the murky, charged scents of the present, and grinned.

There were hills. There were endless, wild, vicious and absolutely uncaring hills which roiled and rolled and ramped upwards, and they had to go over them. The sun beat down upon them, and before long Joan was watching a butterfly sweat-stain spread on the back of Sherlock’s shirt, and could feel the cotton and serge of her own uniform sticking to her skin. Her hands were grazed and cut where she had been grappling with the ground to keep herself moving upwards on the steeper slopes.

“Iliad will be miles away in the wrong direction by now,” Sherlock was saying, “but Achilles Unit has Sally. I suggest we all _move_.”

“I’m pacing myself,” said Joan, grinning and falling into step beside her anyway. “You got invested fast.”

“Who likes losing?” Sherlock asked, and flashed her tobacco smile. Joan felt the air thin and her chest wrench, but she was grinning even so, and realising that—that it would be alright, perhaps; that maybe knowing Sherlock and being here was worth these seasick lurches of the heart.

“No one,” she said, and then, “My God, look at that.”

Joan had grown up in cities; in London and, later, in Paris. Clean air unnerved her; unbroken countryside seemed too expansive. Without the reassuring obstruction of buildings and broken walls, she wasn’t sure how people defined themselves. But straightening up on the hillside and looking out over the rolling sunlit world, the land seemed to scrape the sky, she was momentarily breathless. She pushed her fingers through her hair, nails against her scalp, breath singing hard in her lungs. “God,” said even Anderson.

“Beautiful, isn’t it,” Sherlock said.

“I didn’t think you cared about that sort of thing,” Joan replied, turning to her and finding that Sherlock’s eyes were already fixed on her face. Joan almost started, her lips opening. 

“Doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it,” Sherlock said.

“Alright, no dawdling,” Anderson was yelling. “Move, all of you.”

Sherlock, for once, let everyone move off in front of her until she and Joan were behind them, shoulder to shoulder. “Anderson,” she called, “look out for a hill with a flat top, firs surrounding it.”

Then, when Molly, Gregson and Anderson were all straining their eyes over the countryside again, Sherlock turned around. She opened her mouth like she was going to say something, and then stepped in; leaned in. For a moment Joan thought she had stumbled, or was trying to look at something on Joan’s face—or perhaps trying to lean in close to make some remark she didn’t want anyone else to overhear—

The last theory was the closest, and while Joan was running through it with a blank sort of alarm, stiff and automatically leaning back slightly, Sherlock kissed her.

Her mouth tasted of cigarettes and a burst of something sweet, wet; and the kiss lasted for seconds, but Joan’s hands were hard in the damp cotton of Sherlock’s shirt, Sherlock’s fingers tight in her hair. Hot, searingly hot, and breathless. Too hard for breath. No air between them.

And then they were stumbling apart. Their chests heaving, their eyes wide. Anderson turned. “I can’t see it!” he called.

“No,” said Sherlock, vague and flushed, staring at Joan, “no, I’m not surprised.”

Joan stared back at her, staggered by the sheer absurd enormity of what had just happened, and then looked to the other three members of their unit. Who were completely oblivious. She said, “It’s to the west, isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t exist,” Sherlock muttered privately to her, and rubbed her mouth just once before striding off to the front of the party again, her step less steady than before.

And Joan turned her face up to the sun, and thought: oh God.

She kept thinking it, in every inflection possible, as they struggled through the bracken and the nettles, splashed through a muddy stream, crested one hill and then another. It began to beat with her heart: oh _God_ , oh _God_. And she watched Sherlock, the strain of Sherlock’s shoulderblades and the weight of her breasts jolting under her shirt as she jumped down off a crag, the splatter of blood on Sherlock’s hand when she broke a fall on jagged wet rocks. “Let me…” “No, it’s fine…” They went through the motions of friendship, Joan insisting on wrapping Sherlock’s headscarf around her hand. Sherlock’s fingers flexed against the inside of Joan’s wrist, and Joan swallowed hard, looking dazedly up into her eyes. They were being obvious, Joan was sure. There was a heavy sickness in her stomach because of how obvious they were being.

But Molly just fussed over Sherlock’s cut and Gregson looked nervously at the lowering, reddening sun, and Anderson snapped at them not to waste time.

Oh God, oh God. It came in time with her breathing.

Sunset was pushing through the trees and spilling over the countryside like thick dark honey when they found themselves on familiar ground, not half an hour’s walk from Swordland Lodge. The cooling grass smelt sweet, not unlike the wet smell of the lawns that first night at Wanborough. Sherlock finally fell back into step with Joan. Her body hummed with a nervous, stuttering energy which Joan thought she could feel just from walking beside her.

“I,” she said, “I… _apologi_ —”

“You really don’t have to,” said Joan, quietly and calmly, and it sounded final. Sherlock opened her mouth as if to reply and then balled her hands into fists and swept off almost angrily, thrashing through tall grass and stomping down nettles, trying to substitute ferocity for certainty. She glanced back once; Joan caught her glancing back once, at least.

It was hardest on the last stretch. The familiarity of the countryside made Joan’s muscles ache to give in—to sit down for five minutes at least. She marvelled at Sherlock, who hadn’t had a cigarette since breakfast; well, she marvelled at Sherlock no matter what. She marvelled at Molly, the only member of the party to have snuck past all difficulties without sustaining any kind of injury, even avoiding nettle stings; she marvelled at the unexpectedly hardy Anderson, and Gregson who had later apologised to Sherlock and Joan, as well as to Molly. She marvelled. Marvelled at everything, from the smell of the evening to her own complete and universal lack of understanding. To the taste of Sherlock’s mouth. And struggled onwards.

They were nearly at the finishing point, Joan realised, squinting in the fast-falling gloom and seeing, with a rush of aching, broken-open relief, a little gaggle of figures standing a little way from the lodge.

Sherlock grabbed her wrist. Hot, damp fingers clamped against her skin. Joan jumped. “What?” she asked.

“Run,” said Sherlock, and Joan was half way through a second what before she realised she was doing just that: running.

Sherlock had released her wrist but they were running together, their feet pounding the earth and Anderson yelling, “Hey, _hey_!” after them. His voice was lost to wind and motion. They were running so hard, so breathless, that it wasn’t so very much unlike the kiss they had shared.

“Are we racing?” Joan yelled.

“Not each other!”

Anderson was gaining ground behind them, Joan realised, thundering up through the dusk, and Gregson and Molly were on his heels. And Sherlock wanted to win. Joan wanted it too, she realised—to _win_ , not to _do well in the circumstances_ ; to _win_ , without question or compromise.

Sherlock didn’t have to yell _faster _for Joan to go faster, cutting lines through the sunset towards the men standing by finish point—Bannager, Fairbanks, Carter, _Harding_ , and even Lestrade, whom Sherlock had been right about, of course; God, Joan would have laughed, could have laughed, had she had anything in her lungs, and had Sherlock not cried, “Jump!”__

Joan jumped.

(In the weightless moment she was invaded by the memory of Sherlock’s mouth, the hillside, the land and the sky, the beat of wings inside her chest, a flurry of feeling; _doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it_ ).

The world came crashing and tumbling around them. Joan lost her footing, cracked her knees against the ground, but Harding was booming out laughter well above her and the earth was hot against her cheek. She caught a flash of Sherlock’s wild, absurd face, her curls swinging, sticking to her sweat-sheened forehead, as she laughed and laughed and spat out mud and dirt.

“Christ,” said Joan, shoving herself up on her elbows, her head reeling, “why did we have to jump—” But Anderson was staggering through the gate, and yelling as he caught his foot in something which snapped, and not feet away from them there was an explosive snap. As of a percussion cap.

“Pull switch, Anderson,” said Carter. “Trip wire. Never get so excited about showing off that you don’t look where you’re putting your feet, eh? In the field, we’d all be dead.”

“Oh God,” Joan finally said aloud, “oh _God_.” And she slumped back in the dirt, laughing helplessly with Sherlock beside her.

They had to get up eventually, hauling each other to their feet with some help from Harding. “Very nice,” he told them, giving Joan a slap on the shoulder which resounded through her and made her grin. “Leg better than ever, then?”

“Yessir,” she said, giddy and cocky from success. She was so high on it that she asked, “On holiday or something?” 

Harding laughed. For a strange, discomfiting moment, she saw with unnerving clarity her two parallel opinions of him: that on one hand, she was glad to see him and his rusty moustache, his rough hands and crooked, handsome grin—and on the other, he had been sitting in Wanborough Manor, making mysterious calls to Carter about the training records of five British agents; that he was keeping things from Sherlock, trying to get the best out of her without ever wanting to trust her.

“Some holiday, Watson. Surrounded by insects and Scots—sorry, gents. I’m just here to inspect the troops before you’re handed back to me. Anyway, tomorrow’s parachuting out at Ringway, so that’s always good for a laugh.” Joan choked on nothing and Harding grinned, then looked away, frowning out into the dark. “Hell, is that Donovan?” He knocked Lestrade on the shoulder and lowered his voice. “You might’ve been right about her.”

Lestrade said, peaceably, “Yeah, course I was,” and glanced over at Joan. “Sorry, Corporal,” he added, looking both amused and embarrassed. “It’s protocol, during the first stages of—”

“Oh, she knows,” Sherlock said, leaning against the gate like she was lazy, not exhausted, and smirking. She caught Joan’s eye, and the smirk evened out into something brighter but less sure; and then she looked away. Joan swallowed hard, anxiety and elated shock mixing in her stomach.

This wasn’t—surely this wasn’t going to help anything. No matter how it _felt_ —

Homer Unit had been the first to get in, but Achilles followed soon after, then Telemachus, with some staying to watch the newcomers or talk to the instructors and some stumbling off to wash or rest or seek out food. After Telemachus, Joan lost track of who was coming and going, and when Sherlock patted her on the shoulder and said, “Shall we?” there was nothing to do but say yes, and follow her to the house. All that Bannager said when he saw them leaving was, “Back door,” and Joan nearly cackled helplessly at how like being at home with her mum this was: not being allowed to come in through the front with dirt on her shoes.

Sherlock gripped Joan’s sleeve like she needed support—it was terrible, it gave Joan ideas—and they staggered awkwardly, four-leggedly, through the back door of the lodge. It was only once they were standing in a narrow, dark corridor, with the noise of the kitchen clanging and chattering through the wall, that Joan realised the state they were in. They were both soaked to the knee, at least, muddy and splashed; Joan could feel her boots squelch as she walked. Sherlock had a stripe of reddish dirt along her luminous cheek, and blood caked on her hand, staining the silk scarf wrapped there a dark, gory purple.

They stood and looked at each other like survivors of a direct hit, confused by the reality of what had just happened.

“You kissed me,” Joan said.

“Is that so hard to believe?”

“ _Yes_.”

Sherlock licked her lips, and shrugged, as if trying to dismiss the whole idea, but it wasn’t convincing. “And yet,” she said. Joan swallowed hard. Swallowed down everything.

“I don’t,” she said, “I haven’t done this in a while.”

Sherlock’s lashes flickered, as if confused. She opened her mouth, prepared to say something, then visibly scrapped it, shaking her head. “I haven’t ever done this before,” she said in the end, making it sound like an accusation. 

Joan’s mouth went dry, her stomach dropping and clenching. Cold prickled on her skin. “But with men—”

Sherlock spoke over her, voice hardening: “ _I haven’t ever done this before_.”

Outside, far away, a burst of male laughter fluttered over the lawns. Joan clenched and unclenched her jaw and felt something inside her wrench. It was impossible, suddenly, to think of what would have happened if Sherlock had frequented jazz clubs in 1937. It was impossible to think of anything but Sherlock here and now. Bright, angry Sherlock, with a mind like an ocean in a storm, churning and glinting—with her chin up and her eyes burning cold and her mouth slightly open.

The idea of taking a wrong step with her, of dampening whatever wild flicker made her eyes look like that, of hurting her, was like a punch to the stomach. “Christ,” she said, thinking about Sherlock—Sherlock, living like her, like this, with racing currents of love and need and want snarling beneath her skin and never touching her surface. Sherlock learning to deaden herself to the world, learning to turn her face.

Something of this must have wavered in Joan’s facial expression, because Sherlock said, “I’m well aware of what I’m asking of you, you realise.”

“ _Asking_ of—Jesus.” Joan rubbed her hand over her mouth. “You’re not, is the thing. Actually.”

“It’s not going to change me.”

“It—will change your—situation—”

“My situation? Really? Fabulous, I’ve been trying to change that for years.”

“Sherlock, I’m serious.”

“Surely I’ve already made the fatal mistake of kissing you. Or is that not enough to infect me?”

“Oh, don’t be—”

“I will be,” Sherlock said, her voice icy, “if you insist on being so pedestrian. You were all prepared a few moments ago. I don’t believe I’ve changed much in the past minute. What’s the difference?”

“The difference is I thought you—were more familiar with—” Joan shook her head. Was this logical? She didn’t know, but fear was gripping her windpipe, and she was cold with disgust, angry at herself. It hadn’t come on in the last minute, she knew, whatever Sherlock thought. It had been sitting inside her for five years. “You don’t know what it’s _like_ , Sherlock, being—being—like me.”

“Do you mean _Lesbian_ or _idiotic_ ,” Sherlock said, a cool boredom rippling falsely, dangerously in her tone, daring Joan to test the extent of her disdain. It just made something snap through Joan’s nerves, made her ball her fists up.

“It’s bloody miserable,” she spat, and Sherlock sighed, “Yes, you are,” and Joan said, “ _Shut up_.”

Something about the phrase—maybe something about how Sherlock, too, used it when she had run out of patience and was speechless and stupid with anger—made Sherlock blink for a moment. 

It was enough. Joan pushed herself into the silence, and continued, her voice hard, calm enough to beat back Sherlock’s attempts at interrupting her: “ _Don’t_ sneer at me. I’m not in the mood. It’s miserable, and you should believe it because I’m telling you. Because I’ve lived it. Every day of, of every—”

“Oh, yes, I’ll just switch off my interest in you, why on earth didn’t I think of that before—”

“You’re interested in fun, Sherlock, and adventure, and this is just—keeping secrets and being careful and feeling scared—”

“We’re going to be _parachuted_ into _France_ —”

“It’s just,” Joan said, “a fantasy that goes very sour, very quickly. It’s not—sustainable. It’s not what people do in real life.”

“What do people do, then?” Sherlock snarled, stepping forwards. “What do people have, in their real lives?”

They were close. There was a ringing silence which they both seemed to notice at once, both looking towards the wall which separated them from the kitchen, the moment tilting and sinking, the tension slackening. They didn’t breathe; and then the muted chatter and the noise of pots and pans started up again. Joan swallowed hard, and looked to Sherlock, whose breath was fluttering in her chest. 

“Boyfriends,” she said. It hurt to speak. “Husbands, boyfriends, sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers, friends...I don’t know, Sherlock, I don’t know what people have in their real lives but I...”

“But you want it?” Sherlock sounded incredulous; almost lost, Joan realised, unanchored.

“I want to want it,” Joan said.

“But you don’t want it.”

Joan just stared into Sherlock’s wide pale eyes and longed to feel her crushed up against her again. “You know perfectly well what I want,” she said, keeping her voice as quiet as possible. In the kitchen, water was boiling and bubbling, a kettle screaming.

“So leave it,” said Sherlock, “leave all that, it’s not like it matters, you clearly don’t _want_ to be like everyone else,” and Joan finally stepped away, groaning and rubbing her hand through her hair.

“No,” she said, “Jesus, it’s not that simple—”

“Don’t be so absurd—”

“I can’t stop being _so absurd_ ,” Joan said in a gritted hiss, a sneer coming to her lips; “I am _absurd_ , actually, if you haven’t noticed, or _queer_ , or _Lesbian_ , like you were shouting at the top of your lungs earlier—for God’s sake, it’s just not so simple, Persie, and it never will—”

Sherlock’s face had gone blank. Joan’s stomach had dropped.

She raised her hand, rubbed her forehead, covered her eyes.

“Sherlock,” she said. “Sherlock. Sorry. Persie—was the last person I had this argument with.”

In the darkness behind her fingers, Joan heard Sherlock’s breathing. Even, slow. She felt sick, unsteady, dull and horror-struck. Sherlock’s voice, when she spoke, was distant and fatally cold. “Much like me, was she?”

“No,” Joan said quietly. “No, nothing like you.”

“I see.”

“Really. Really, she was...very different. Just the subject matter was...sorry.”

“Do go on.” Frost had formed on the surface of Sherlock’s voice, and Joan felt it chill her right down in her churning insides. “Do tell, what was she like?”

She closed her eyes tight for a single moment, then dropped her hand, shook her head. “Blonde,” she said. “Tiny—I mean, minute. Sort of—sharp. But not exactly—not—solid.”

“Oh?”

“You don’t want me to—”

“ _I want you to go on_.”

“Dreamy. Not...realistic.”

“Unreliable,” Sherlock suggested. Her voice was removed and cold as an Arctic wasteland; white as far as the eye could see. “Spoilt, impractical, _childish_.” 

“Sometimes, yes,” Joan said. She didn’t understand why Sherlock cared, but she felt like telling her this was the least that she owed her. Her mouth was dry, but she barely noticed; it was Sherlock’s mouth which was taking up her attention.

At Joan’s _yes_ , Sherlock’s lips crumpled and straightened. Her face was white, cold-looking, immobile, like a statue on a chilly day, chafed at by centuries of cold winds but staying clench-jawed through it all. Even her eyes were marble, pierced through and staring.

“In other words,” Sherlock said, “barring height and hair colour, we’re identical in your eyes. Childish, spoilt, would-be debutantes throwing a charmed life away.”

Joan understood, suddenly. It was like finding a handhold. Her heart was buoyed up on a swell of desperate hope. Sweat broke out on her skin in her urgency to say, “No. No. I meant it. She was nothing like you.”

Sherlock opened her mouth as if to finally shout at her and then looked hopefully confused, broken up, her statue-like appearance smashed to rubble; she was suddenly scattered, wild-animal angry, nostrils flaring like those of a startled horse, and Joan knew she had seconds before she bolted or lashed out.

She swallowed. And began. “You’re not—okay, yes, you’re impossible, you’re incredibly stupid, you’re an arrogant little sod, you do dangerous, ridiculous things, and you’re occasionally—more than occasionally—bloody spiteful, but God, you’re—”

What was she? Joan reached for words: “—you’re so _alive_.”

Sherlock just blinked.

She sounded stupid, Joan thought; she was laughing nervously, swallowing, pushing her hair back from her face, shaking her head. Wild, frenetic movements. Sherlock had been baffled into silence and stillness. Joan didn’t blame her. She waited a few moments, gaining her breath back—she was panting. Swallowing again, scared out of her wits. Trying to keep her voice low. 

“Uh. I. Uh. Look. That might not make much sense. I didn’t—the difference between you and Persie is—beyond you being a genius, and everything, and _you_ —the thing is that I don’t think I ever saw Persie get angry or really want something, because she...was satisfied. With everything. And that was why she was childish and all the rest. And you’re not like that, not quite. And I don’t...I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you for not being satisfied. In fact I think you’re sane because you’re not satisfied.”

The silence which came after, punctuated by the muted chatter of next door, underlined the profound, dull stupidity of her speech, and she wanted to crumble inwards, collapse into herself, just—cease. Everything was too complex. If it could all just—stop. Just stop. 

She had closed her eyes. “Alive,” said Sherlock, slowly. Joan pried her lids open and gave a high, scared laugh.

“Did I say that?” she asked weakly. “Sorry. I’ll—cut out the poetry next time.”

“Next time,” Sherlock said, voice still slow, but now stirred through with a kind of amusement, a nervous flicker of her mouth, which made Joan actually choke, gasp, and laugh again.

“God help me,” she muttered. “Yes. Next time I tell you why I want you.”

“Do you plan on making a habit of it?”

“Whatever I plan on doing never seems to happen, does it? Unless we stop talking forever, Sherlock, I will—I will probably—get drunk, or get maudlin, and, yes, at some point, tell you again that I—and it will be just as embarrassing as the first time. So—”

“Stop.”

“Good idea.”

“That could be avoided.”

“Really.”

“Yes.” Sherlock licked her lips. “I’d like to—return to my previous line of argument, regarding—”

“Sherlock. Can I—one question?”

“If you must,” Sherlock said. Her attempt at casual sharpness was a muted mumble.

“Why did you do that?”

Sherlock looked at her. “Because I wanted to,” she said.

“Nope,” said Joan, “sorry. Not an answer.”

Sherlock seemed to clench and unclench her jaw for a moment, as if gnawing on the words inside her mouth, then said, “On the subject of—that is, I feel—satisfied— _closer_ to satisfaction—with—” but she stopped herself. Joan could have sworn she inclined her head slightly, nodding to Joan as if to substitute that for being unable to say ( _had she been going to say_ —) you ( _you?_ )

Instead, cutting all that off, Sherlock took a sudden step closer, and Joan tried to remind herself of what she should want even as she raised her chin to receive her, even while her heart lit up, flickering like an old light which hadn’t been turned on for weeks, struggling to illuminate her but flashing bright— _bright_ —as Sherlock stepped closer—

There was an enormous clatter from the kitchen and several raised, female voices, the noises belling and braying together. Joan jumped; Sherlock closed her eyes, rippled like an irritated cat. 

“For God’s sake,” Sherlock muttered, “let’s get out of here.” She was still bent towards Joan, frozen awkwardly bowed.

Joan could smell her tobacco, her soap. And realised what she wanted to do. “Somewhere private. Bathroom.”

“Shower block,” Sherlock corrected her. They were both using quiet, clipped, operational voices. Efficient calm, with their mouths inches apart, heating the air between them. “Or we’ll be interrupted.”

Joan’s decision made, the world turned clear and unstrained, cool as water. Completely simple. She closed the gap between her and Sherlock as fast as she could, and kissed her. 

In the kitchen, there was a clatter of saucepans and a woman’s raised voice, indistinct through the wall— “... _attention_ , Anais—” and there was something intensely private about this, them, pressed speechlessly together in the midst of all the chaos. Joan kissed Sherlock through it all.

They came away gasping. “You go,” said Joan, her fingers still clamped tightly in the curls at the back of Sherlock’s head, their noses pushed together, chests heaving. “It’s always locked because none of the girls use it. Can you—”

“Yes.”

“Good. Good.” She released her grip on Sherlock’s hair, stepped back. “The lights don’t work. I’m going to get a torch.” A beat, during which Sherlock just stared at her. “Go!”

Sherlock flew into action, pushing past Joan, her fingers nudging for a second at Joan’s hip to move her out of the way, and the door clattering behind her. Joan only waited to pull off her socks and boots, to lessen the chance of tracking mud along the floors as she raced up to their room and threw on the light.

Molly and Sally weren’t there. Joan dropped her boots, snatched up her torch, and then opened Sherlock’s pack to find hers. It was old, expensive-looking, not military issue. Did Sherlock go walking in the blackout? Was it a relic from the raids? Had she been in London then? Joan’s mind seemed to be flickering like a film reel, presenting her with a hundred images real and imagined; Sherlock in a shelter in her pajamas, snarling uselessly up at the Germans dropping bombs on her, Sherlock breaking Mathews’ nose in a swift, dismissive movement, Sherlock leaning a silken hip against the bar and saying _you may as well make mine a gin and lemon_. What was she doing to her? (Joan didn’t know who was the object and who was the subject or whether she remembered the difference properly). What was she doing to her? She could feel—

That was it, that was all. She could feel.

She felt, for the first time in five years, like one complete person, not several versions thinned out and spread out, to be selected for their aptness to the situation. Not a particularly good complete person, but a real one, vivid, with all her selves melded into one, terrifically bright, detailed Joan Watson, thinking about Sherlock Holmes.

Keeping Sherlock Holmes waiting, in fact. But there was something to knowing Sherlock was waiting, _for her_ —Joan wrenched her mind from the idea because it made her feel too dizzy, and snatched up a handful of un-muddied clothes for both of them, trying to hold them away from herself so as not to transfer any dirt.

It wasn’t until she was at the back door again that she realised her feet were bare. She stopped, then started again and ran through the dry grass. Her feet couldn’t get dirtier—and she couldn’t stop. If she stopped, she might start thinking again.

Underfoot the grass was cool, crunching, tickly. A trail of men were huddled outside the male shower block some distance away, lit up with glowing cigarette ends and the dim, buzzing light of electric lamps and taking no notice of Joan, if they saw her at all.

The female shower block was squat and ugly even in the dark; there was no sign of Sherlock, but Joan found the door leaning open. It was pitch black inside, and smelt damply antiseptic. “Sher—”

“Here,” said Sherlock, right next to her ear, her breath wet and hot and pushing against Joan’s neck, and Joan said, “Oh, fuck,” and nearly dropped her armful of clothes and torches; Sherlock caught the burden, stepping close, their arms knocking together.

“Careful,” she murmured, amusement flickering in her voice.

“You don’t make it easy,” said Joan, and they deposited the clean clothes on the bench. It felt absurd, in the dark, to be fussing with fabric and torches, when Sherlock’s limbs kept bumping against Joan’s and if Joan thought about it, she could still remember how Sherlock’s mouth felt on hers. Their breathing was loud in the dark.

Sherlock said, “Won’t torches be inconveni—”

“Hold on.”

There were long clothes-hooks ranged along the wall. Joan rested her torch along one and then undid her tie and used it to lash the torch in place. Her fingers were hot, damp, heart humming, but an intent calm had overtaken her. She felt bright, focused, the world doing what she told it to do as she pulled the knot tight, took a breath.

Joan felt a nudge to her fingers: Sherlock’s hand, and Sherlock’s tie wound around her fingers. She had worked it out, of course. “Thanks,” Joan said, taking it from her. “I wanted to, ah, take that off myself, actually.” She thought she heard Sherlock’s breath catch in the dark; a quick-muffled, hissing sound.

She fixed Sherlock’s torch to a hook, and flicked them both on at the same time. The glow from Sherlock’s was more orange, and flickered less; her own torchlight was paler and buzzed hard, creating fuzzy, spluttering shadows. Joan looked at Sherlock, caught between the two lights. Not only had she taken off her tie, but she had undone her shirt by a few buttons, revealing a triangle of pale skin. She looked spectral, sharp, lit up in strange, angular shapes. Joan said, “Come here now.”

Sherlock’s mouth tasted just like it had tasted before and Joan reeled helplessly at the idea that she might have the opportunity to be familiar with this—the urgent, hungry slide of Sherlock’s mouth against hers. Her fingers were on Sherlock’s sides, feeling how the cotton was stuck to her, sweat chilling in the evening cool. “If you don’t take my clothes off,” said Sherlock, and Joan didn’t know if it was the beginning of a threat or a genuine query. Either way, it was pointless; Joan’s fingers were already on Sherlock’s buttons, peeling her out of her shirt, and Sherlock was squirming and twisting, trying to help and mostly hindering.

Beneath her shirt, Sherlock’s breasts were cupped in the white satiny cones of her WAAF issue bra. “Oh, God,” Joan said, pushing her face to the side of Sherlock’s throat and feeling her hard breath stir her hair. It made her shiver. “So you haven’t—before,” she said, giving herself one last chance to feel the wrongness of what she was doing and finding her conscience unforthcoming, her hands stealing up Sherlock’s sides and stomach. Sherlock’s long fingers were pushing through Joan’s hair, moving with a scientific slowness.

“No,” said Sherlock, and Joan groaned into her skin; “no, but you are not at liberty to treat me like I’m fragile.”

So Joan’s fingers shucked off Sherlock’s belt, pried warm, sweat-sodden khaki from her hips, snapped knicker elastic and pushed her, pulled her out of her clothes, and said, “I won’t,” while Sherlock toed off her socks and boots, and ducked away from her to wander over the wall, underneath one of the showerheads, in just her pants and bra.

“Twilights and blackouts,” she said inscrutably, tossing the words over her shoulder. Joan felt stunned, watching the dim torchlight make Sherlock’s hard, pointed shoulderblades glow. “Ought I to apologise for those, at least?”

“What?” Joan asked, numb and weak. Weak-kneed? God—like she was a teenager all over again, struggling helplessly, desperately, with Persie Phelps’ underwear, making strangled, soft noises of desperation—but no, this was— _different_ —

“You wouldn’t know,” Sherlock said, snapping open her bra and tossing it across the shower block. Joan thought, _it’s going to be hell trying to find that again_. Sherlock apparently didn’t, because the next thing she was doing was pushing down her flimsy pants and bending to hook them off her ankles, looking prepared to hurl those, too, into the distant dark. “The ATS get khaki underwear. We have to suffer through black and a sort of faded tan. Black woollen knickers, blackouts…” Joan looked down. There was a tangle of black on the ground, and she remembered the scrape of wool against her fingers. “...and twilights; tan silk liners to wear inside them.” Joan looked up.

Sherlock was facing her in the flickering orange light, naked. She was clutching her tan silk twilights in her hand, not dangling them off a finger like a pin-up girl might; though then again, a pin-up girl wouldn’t wear such old-fashioned underwear; wouldn’t have faint indents underlining her breasts where her WAAF-issue bra had been digging into her soft, giving skin. Her headscarf was still wrapped around her left hand. She looked awkward, defiant. “I assume,” she said haughtily, “that this is how people do this sort of thing?”

Joan stepped forwards, and took the tan silk from her unresisting fingers. It was warm from her body. She tossed it over to where the rest of Sherlock’s muddy khaki battle dress lay. And she said, “No, not really,” and kissed her again, feeling her naked skin against her thick khaki serge, feeling her warm and desperately alive.

Then Sherlock’s hands were untucking Joan’s shirt from her trousers and sneaking up to the bare skin of her sides. Christ. Joan suddenly realised how long it had been. Since Paris, really, save for a few miserable, lukewarm fumbles in the bathrooms of cinemas while on leave; half a stolen kiss in a Nissen hut with another driver who had hastily pulled away and the next morning requested a transfer; even once with a miserable little civil servant in his miserable little flat, trying to feel some enthusiasm about his sad, strange little body.

Never like this—pressing Sherlock, _squirming_ , between the hard, gritty tiles and her own body, tasting her mouth over and over.

“Joan,” Sherlock was saying, like something out of the hideous, predatory fantasies Joan hadn’t let herself entertain, “ _Joan_.” 

Joan had never expected this.

Except she had, hadn’t she? She had felt the pressure and the heat between them, the way in which Sherlock spoke over her and then skittered away, unsure of herself and of Joan and of whatever quivered between them like a taut silver thread. Joan had refused to expect this, that was it; and now her anger at herself crashed in on her. She had let Sherlock make the first move, she had left her alone in this and then snarled at her, fought her off, made her feel—something terrible, whatever had made her freeze over, turn to stone, for that horrible five minutes or however long it had been—because she, Joan Watson, was an idiot—

But she couldn’t think like that when Sherlock’s mouth was at her ear. She couldn’t think at all. There was a bubble of elation expanding in her chest, forcing her breath away, making her throat tight, making her gasp.

Sherlock muttered, “I want, I—” She was shaking, gripping Joan all the harder for it. Nervous and angry about it, washed in torchlight.

“I know what you wa—”

“ _I_ know what I want, don’t _tell_ me—”

“Alright,” Joan said, “alright,” and pushed her harder against the wall. Her shirt was hanging off her shoulders; Sherlock’s hands were cupping her breasts inexpertly. She could feel the heat of them through the fabric of her bra, feel how Sherlock was fumbling against the fabric, pressing her fingertips into the skin above the cups. “Here. Here, it’s easier if—if.” She reached behind herself to unsnap her own bra, felt it slither down her body, and then Sherlock’s hands were on her.

No; not since Paris, years ago. Joan was biting down hard on Sherlock’s shoulder, her hands at her hips, while Sherlock weighed her breasts in her hands with a nervy eagerness, rolling her nipples hard under her palms, making Joan groan against her skin. It was hot, _hot_ , sticky and burning and the air itself seemed damp and Joan didn’t want it to stop.

“When you,” Sherlock said, and then sounded frustrated with herself, “that is, when I said—after Mathews broke my tooth—”

“Oh God,” said Joan, knowing what was coming. How could Sherlock want to _talk_?

“You were angry with me.”

“I wasn’t angry with you,” Joan said, her voice low. Sherlock’s nose was skimming past hers, her lips a breath away. “I was—I was not angry with you,” and she pushed the last word into Sherlock’s mouth, pushing her thumbs into the spaces above her hipbones, feeling out the very frame of her. Everywhere their skin touched was hot, slick with sweat. Sherlock made a broken noise and spread out her fingers along Joan’s sides, dug her nails in.

Joan’s hips rocked, pushed, arousal clenching in her, tightening and sparking. Fuck. Sherlock’s hands were cold, stealing the heat right out of Joan’s skin and making her shiver, grip her harder. Joan both felt and heard her say, “What was it, then?”

Joan tried to lick the question out of her mouth, but Sherlock turned her head, pressed their cheeks clumsily together and then nuzzled at her ear—clumsy, pushing movements interrupted by huffs of hot breath. Joan swallowed, screwed her eyes shut. Again, Sherlock insisted, “ _Tell_ me. What was it?” 

“Can’t remember,” Joan all but groaned.

“Yes, you can. I can. You had your fingers,” Sherlock’s voice was a husky strain in the dark, vibrating down through Joan’s chest, “right by my mouth.”

“Right, well, I can think of better places to put them,” Joan said, the vulgarity jerked out of her by desperation, but Sherlock gasped, and Joan thought, _oh, okay_. She found Sherlock’s nipple, clamped it between her fingers, and Sherlock produced a yelping moan, her body tensing and pushing forwards, all her hard edges ramming up against Joan. Joan pinched her too roughly, twisted, and pushed her knee between Sherlock’s legs. 

For a horrible weightless moment she thought _that’s it, she’ll stop you_ and there was almost a glee to it, not because she wanted to be stopped but because it was _expected_ , it was _normal_ to be stopped—and Sherlock just hissed her breath in, a violent, angry sound, and scrabbled for purchase at Joan’s hips, push—push—pushing against Joan’s clothed thigh.

Joan was slammed back down into her own body and she felt herself groan, thick and ragged. Sherlock’s inner thighs were hot, Sherlock’s skin was hot, they were sticking and smacking and shoving against each other and Sherlock’s teeth were on Joan’s shoulder. “Sherlock, Sherlock,” Joan said, “Sherlock, oh, Jesus.”

“You do remember,” Sherlock told her, almost snapped at her, her voice urgent. Joan felt sweat break over her, a whole body shiver. When she shuddered, she shuddered up against Sherlock’s body. Sherlock must be able to feel it. “You _do_.”

“Yes,” Joan said, and took a breath, and slid her hand down Sherlock’s stomach, feeling how she was pulled taut, heatbeat vibrating through slabs of muscle. Quirking, shaking. Her fingertips grazed rough curls, and Sherlock jerked still, her lack of motion somehow more startling than when she had been squirming. “Yes, that’s right, I do remember. Can I...?”

“Do it,” Sherlock said, as if giving Joan permission to flick a switch or hit a button—to set a charge...

“Oh Christ,” Joan said, and dropped her head to Sherlock’s shoulder, pushing her hand down, finding slickness, wetness, _heat_... “Oh, Christ, I wish I could see you properly. You know that? I wish—” _I wish I could open your legs and look at you_ , but she couldn’t say that; Sherlock was stiff, trembling against her, and Joan stayed still too, her fingers not moving. Hesitant. “You—don’t have to hold still. Relax.”

“I thought—it might be easier for you if—”

“Team effort. You _don’t_ have to hold still.”

So Sherlock pushed and Joan’s fingers slid as she stroked her, coaxed her, it felt like, and words tumbled from Sherlock’s mouth; “Your fingers, you, you had—” She was rippling against her, Joan thought, with a burst of something like wonder; she was moving, bucking, coming in and out like the sea...

Joan knew what Sherlock was talking about. She raised her head. With their faces so close together, their lips brushed at every bump and push of Sherlock’s hips against her hand. Sherlock leaned forwards, nibbled Joan’s upper lip, whimpered faintly into her mouth. Over and over. Barely-there kisses. The torchlight buzzed, flickered. Joan tried to be gentle, tried to tease over Sherlock’s clit, but Sherlock trapped her hand between their bodies, _shoved_. “I wasn’t angry,” Joan repeated, mouthing at Sherlock’s lower lip. She twisted her wrist, trying to push her hand more comfortably in between them, making Sherlock squirm and make a strangled, needy noise. “I—God.”

“Shut up,” Sherlock gasped, “shut up, just talk.”

Joan didn’t think it would be fair to ask how she could do both, but she huffed a breathless giggle into the spot where Sherlock’s jaw joined her throat, and felt her whine in response. “Okay, I, uh, for context, I was trying to check you still had all your teeth, for God’s sake, so this was just, just totally bloody ridiculous, but I said something about—putting my—my fingers in your mouth. Yes?”

“Yes,” said Sherlock, into Joan’s mouth, and then, “ _Hn_ ,” as Joan pressed a finger up into her, thumb slipping—she was being clumsy, Joan knew, her hands shaking and over-eager, but it felt right, like this, with Sherlock pinned awkwardly back against the tiles and their breathing ragged.

“And you,” Joan said, “you said _not here_ , like I’d just, I don’t know, said—God, it was mad, stupid, this is—are you okay?”

“Yes. _Yes_. Stop and I’ll—nn. Just keep—keep talking. I said _not here_ like you’d just said what?”

“Like I’d just said I wanted to,” another taste of Sherlock’s mouth, Joan lingering on her lower lip with her eyes closed, feeling her wrist ache as she rubbed and coaxed and felt Sherlock clench around her fingers and rut against her thumb, felt her breathing hitch and her chest shudder against her, felt her heartbeat jolt through them both, “to fuck you, right there, to get my hands inside your—damned, bloody battle dress, that you made such a stupid fuss about—and it looks so—Christ, I’m no good at talking like this—”

“You’re very, very good at talking like this—”

“—let me, just let me—” 

“Don’t stop,” Sherlock insisted, and then with something like panic, pleading, “I said don’t _stop_ , Joan!” 

Joan was pulling her hand from between Sherlock’s legs and trying to shush her, her hands on her hips; “I’m _not_ —” Sherlock’s hands were hard on Joan’s wrists “—I’m not. Turn around.”

Sherlock breathed with her for a few moments, then loosened her grip very slowly and turned. It was a gorgeous sight. She braced her hands against the wall and Joan watched the two-toned torchlight light up her pale, narrow, naked back. 

The break from contact was a moment of blessed cool, but Joan didn’t want it; didn’t want anything but the heat of Sherlock’s bare, curious body. She was so long, so unclassical, with a greyhound leanness interrupted by tight, pert curves—Joan was unfastening her own trousers, stepping out of them; beneath she was wearing only her khaki liners—her back looked vulnerable, open, and Joan wanted to cover it with her own body, feel her breasts pushed flat against the plane of Sherlock’s skin.

She stepped closer, practically leaning against her, and reached around, sliding her palm flat down her side, over her hip, across her stomach and down, to find once more Sherlock’s cunt—open, and so wet, so hot that Joan nearly lost her breath with how urgently alive she was. How alive she felt, too, pressed here.

“Oh,” said Sherlock, “alright, yes,” and arched, pulling away and pushing down and bearing down and Joan bit hard into her shoulder and felt her moan vibrate through them both.

Team effort, had she said? It felt like one; they rocked together, Joan lifting up on tiptoe to lick the sweat from Sherlock’s neck, mouthing away salt. “You okay?” Joan kept asking, until Sherlock finally groaned, “Yes, yes, of course, _do_ stop asking,” and Joan giggled wildly, helplessly, trying to muffle herself against the hot bare skin of Sherlock’s shoulder.

“God, you’re beautiful,” she said instead. “You’re, you’re stunning.”

Their bodies slid together. She felt the muscles beneath her cheek shift as Sherlock raised her arm and reached backwards, and then her fingers were threading through Joan’s hair, clenching and clawing in the rhythm of their rocking. Joan felt want burst right through her with an electric crackle, from brain to hips to cunt to mouth to the tips of her fingers and she gasped, digging her nails into Sherlock’s flank and pushing harder into her.

“Joan,” Sherlock said, “ _Joan_.” She was twisting between Joan and the wall, straining, searching, turning, trying to turn her head and shoulders far enough to catch Joan’s lips. Joan said her name back to her, feeding it back to her—she rocked her wrist faster—and Sherlock couldn’t quite kiss her but Joan knew she was going to come from how her breathing changed rhythm and her hard little puffs of breath knocked against Joan’s lips.

“Yes,” Joan said, “yes, come on.” Sherlock stiffened, pulled taut, hauled in her breath and—broke. Joan felt her come. Hard shudders, silent, reaching, rutting, her breath finally exploding noisily from her mouth, catching the end of a suppressed whimper—hips finally snapping, every muscle in her vibrating against Joan—who was saying, “Yes, God, _perfect_.”

Sherlock slumped back against Joan, not the wall, and Joan had to release her hip and push her hand against the wall to keep them both steady. Her fingers were still between Sherlock’s legs, still inside her; an aftershock rippled through her, and she felt her _twitch_.

Joan said, “Fuck,” and a whole succession of images clattered through her brain, ideas of turning Sherlock around again and bringing her to sit on the floor and licking her until she came again, and again after that, sucking at her clit, her lips, where she was swollen and hot and over-sensitive, feeling each overwhelmed shudder against her tongue—she clamped down hard on that train of thought. And breathed. 

“You okay?” she managed, voice weak. They were so close, she was almost afraid that Sherlock might have overheard her thoughts.

But, “Yes,” Sherlock muttered, head lolling back onto Joan’s shoulder for a moment before she started trying to find her feet, even though Joan was telling her to relax—she grabbed at Joan’s arm, straightened up unsteadily, turned.

Her face was open, relaxed, dazed. The light made her seem young. So did the way her eyes skimmed Joan’s features, her curiosity for once not hidden. Joan cupped her cheek. Kissed her. Kissed her again. Said, “Sorry. Was that—probably not.”

“What?” Sherlock asked weakly, sounding perplexed to the point of vague irritation and leaning her forehead against Joan’s. Her hands were unsteady, moving, as if she were flickering indecisively, unsure which parts of Joan she wanted to touch first. Her hands smoothed shakily over Joan’s shoulders, up her neck, down over her breasts...crept to her sides. Almost tentatively. Joan shut her eyes at how gently Sherlock’s fingers curled against her ribs.

“Probably wasn’t what you were expecting,” Joan said.

“I wasn’t expecting anything.”

“Have you ever—even kissed someone?”

“Obviously.”

Joan took a moment to consider this. In the interlude, Sherlock pushed their mouths urgently together, almost clumsily. Something about the sudden, awkward kiss made Joan remember that thinking around Sherlock’s pronouncements was sometimes a very circuitous process and sometimes as simple as taking shortcuts through literalism.

Their lips parted with a soft, wet noise. “Other than me,” she clarified.

“Why would I want to do that?” Sherlock asked, and Joan, for a moment, couldn’t answer. She thought: _boyfriends, husbands_ , but shut down the flare of fear and worry that flickered momentarily in her chest, and smiled. _Why would I want to do that_ , like Joan was a revelation. Joan was glad they were in half-light. It was embarrassing enough now. It would be mortifying, in the full glare of daylight, to be considered a revelation.

And it moved something which had been dormant in her for a while; dormant like volcanoes were, or like they were thought to be before they erupted and—Sherlock was kissing her again, her hands growing braver but no less unsettled.

“Would you mind,” Sherlock began, and Joan said, half-relieved and half-disappointed, “No, no, of course, it’s fine. Don’t worry.”

Then Sherlock swallowed hard and pressed her mouth to Joan’s throat, craned her neck to kiss down, down, bent so that she could catch Joan’s nipple in her mouth and Joan gasped, grabbed a handful of her wild dark hair and thought that perhaps they had been talking about different things. “Sherlock, what—”

“I want—”

“But you said—”

“I was asking you if I could—”

“Right,” Joan said, “right, I thought you meant you’d rather not— _mm_ ,” and she lurched forwards, slamming her hands against the wall opposite, bracing her feet further apart, her eyes wide. Sherlock had dropped to her knees, neatly pushed Joan’s underwear down, and Joan could feel her _breathing_. There was the faint warm tickle of curly hair against her stomach.

Sherlock chuckled, and Joan’s head drooped. “Okay,” she said dizzily, “okay, we could—”

“How would you prefer I do this?”

“What? Oh, Christ, Sherlock, I’ve no bloody clue at this point, I don’t know my own name, so if you could just— _oh_ , yeah, that’ll—do...” Her words were strangled, her shoulders shaking, her chest heaving, and while Sherlock’s forehead was leaning against her lower stomach, feverishly hot, one of her fingers was exploring the lips and the gap of Joan’s cunt, running electricity along each point of hot, swollen flesh.

Or so it felt. Joan was afraid she might come from that. From Sherlock’s fingertip. From the rolling flashes of heat, want, need. She was choking on her own words before she realised she was speaking at all, “Christ, Sherlock, God, I can feel you breathing—” she could, too, huffs of breath hitting her mons, faintly chilling the damp sheen on the insides of her thighs “—I can, I—”

“My mouth,” Sherlock said, the vibrations running through Joan’s bones, making her eyes shut tight. Her fingers—two of them now, rubbing slowly at Joan’s clit, sending white sparks up through her whole body. Joan gritted her nails against the wall, clenched her teeth. “I assume that would—”

“Oh fuck,” Joan said, “oh fuck, yes, do that,” and Sherlock might have made a noise but it was lost in the burst of sensation as she tilted her mouth up to Joan’s cunt, craned her neck, sucked messily at her clit while her fingers were tracing around her lips, still, massaging and stroking but never quite pushing inside, and Joan was pushing against her tongue, her fingers—

“—your fucking _mouth_ —”

— _coming_ , surprising herself, riding Sherlock’s tongue and lips and swearing the air blue, groaning Army filth of the worst kind, clawing at the caulk in between the tiles and her whole body spasming, racked by deep shudders—

Over. She staggered. Sherlock made a muffled noise and twisted awkwardly away, sitting back on her heels. The world was dazed, spinning, and Joan couldn’t get a grip on it. It was tumbling away from her. Aftershocks rocked her, hard and bitter, unwanted now.

Over. Joan slumped, sat down like a sack of bricks, dully conscious of how cumbersome and lumbering she must seem, how bullish and ugly, after saying _do that_ , and Sherlock not having done anything like this before, and the things she had let come out of her mouth, the mouth that—that Sherlock was kissing. 

She could taste herself.

“Oh,” she said, muffled, wet. Sherlock’s kiss was rich, full, and mortifyingly, delightfully salty. _Eager_ , still, after everything.

She was, Joan thought, a bit of a revelation of her own. But then Joan had always known that.

“I’ve had an idea,” Sherlock said finally, in a lazy drawl, nibbling at Joan’s lower lip.

“Jesus,” Joan said. “I’m not going to survive another.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANKS FOR READING—ahahaha I am so deliriously excited to actually post this chapter. Somewhat unsurprisingly given what makes up the bulk of it, there aren't many footnotes this time around! However, I do have two very general ones and a French translation:
> 
>  **"le mode de vie français"** \- (and not 'la mode de vie'; thanks to SparklingSoul for that correction!) translates as 'the French way of life' or lifestyle.
> 
>  **"something more than just a hike"** \- While I pulled the stuff about jumping from trucks and the unit names etc out of nowhere because...I like it when people jump from moving vehicles (seriously, this is apparently a theme in my writing), SOE trainee agents really were put on a day-long hike in Scotland as an assessment. Hill-walking was a really important part of their training because it strengthened the ankles for parachuting. The more you know? (Also, apparently the ones headed to France used to make up dirty songs in French to keep them going as they walked).
> 
>  **"Lesbian or idiotic"** \- Joan's slight meltdown here is influenced by a theme in lesbian pulp fiction of the day(ish)! The idea of lesbianism ~dooming~ you, particularly of 'active lesbianism' being a sort of steady downwards spiral, is really common there—that and, of course, Joan's association of queerness with irresponsibility, which was/is both a stereotype and something Joan feels has been affirmed by her own experiences.
> 
> Again, a huge thank you for reading so far. I FEEL THIS IS A MILESTONE. How exciting. Chapter 11 will be here Monday 9th September!


	11. The Most Exciting Room In London.

**JULY 1942  
LONDON**

Paint was peeling from the front door, cracking in layers, showing green over red over blue over plain brown wood. Joan, who had picked up the bad habit of occasionally trying to think like Sherlock, wondered if that meant that the house had passed through a few different hands in quick succession, but she couldn’t prove the theory or put any faith in it. Nor did it really matter. As long as the current occupant would stay put for the weekend while she was in London, Joan would be happy. She would be happier if he’d stay put for good, but she had given up on hoping for too much.

The door opened. Behind it stood a tall, slender man with bright golden hair and a smile which could earn him a fine in the blackout. “Joan!” he said, much too loudly in such a quiet, private street, and swooped down to wrap an arm around her.

Despite herself, Joan smiled into the warm shoulder of his creased grey suit jacket—the colour and the smell of stale smoke.

“Hi, Harry,” she said, patting his arm awkwardly and hoping he’d bring her inside quickly, not to mention close the bloody door. She could feel lace curtains twitching, lips pursing. What had possessed him to live in this sort of area? Not that she wanted him rotting in a den of iniquity, but with his natty suit and the Brylcreem drying in his hair giving him an air of polished plastic, she could imagine what the neighbours must say. Mind you, that was always the problem with Harry; he couldn’t.

He gave her a hard squeeze and finally released her, pulling her through the door and immediately launching, as was his way, into a chatter which was chiefly just white noise, and which Joan was so accustomed to that she could probably have done it for him, except their accents didn’t quite match. It was true that when she visited him, her Cockney started bubbling up through the cracks, but Harry’s chat was pure, unadulterated East End banter, thicker than the air on the Tube on a hot day. He kept it up as he waved her into a chair in his absurdly chintzy front room. She worked a smile onto her face and sat as rigidly as she could while being swallowed by the upholstery.

There were biscuits on the coffee table. A ridiculous, unpatriotic, totally illegal amount of them, with chocolate on them, and a few crumbs scattered along the side of the plate where Harry had already pilfered a few then rearranged the remaining ones to hide the gaps. Joan stared fixedly down at them and tried not to say anything, until Harry—his hands on the back of the armchair opposite, not sitting down—said, with a kind of terrified cheer, “Bless you, coming in uniform, maybe it’ll calm down the bints next door that keep giving me white feathers!”

Joan shot to her feet, suddenly wanting to go, right now. This had been a mistake. “I’m not staying,” she said, and even her voice felt stiff. She could hear how posh she sounded next to Harry, and her stomach churned, but she couldn’t bring herself to fake a dropped consonant now. “Don’t—put on a show, Harry, come on.” 

His illegally bright smile was fading. “You’re not going _now_. Are you?”

Joan took a moment to steady herself, pinching the bridge of her nose. “No,” she said finally, though she wanted to get out and walk, in any direction which would take her away from him and back to Sherlock. But she couldn’t do that until she had gotten what she needed from Harry.

She was on an operation. That was all this was. It was tempting to think of Sherlock, and what her reward for getting through this would be, but Joan knew it wouldn’t work; there was no point distracting herself like that. She just had to think of nothing whatsoever. “No,” she said again, dropping her hand, her voice clearer. “I’m not going right now.”

Harry bit his lip, a nervous tic he shared with Joan, and nodded anxiously at the chair she’d vacated. “Go on, then. I’ll get you a bit of tea, alright?”

“You don’t have to—” But it might help, Joan supposed. “Alright. Yeah, fine.”

“What, really?” Harry asked, and Joan remembered that her brother might be an idiot but he wasn’t in the least bit stupid. She never usually gave in to offers of tea so readily, particularly when Harry always had suspicious amounts of teabags, milk and sugar.

“Yeah,” she said lamely. “It’s been a long day.”

Harry raised his eyebrows up to heaven and said nothing as he sauntered to the kitchen. Coming from someone so naturally loud, his knowing silence was much more damning than any remark could have been. Joan rubbed her face and decided to count it as training; when trying to hide something, you had to know how you usually acted and you had to stick to it...

But she knew all that. It was all this stuff with Sherlock that was destabilising her usually perfect mechanisms of vague deceit. Not lying—just skilful misdirection, and the keeping of secrets. Sherlock had unsettled things, cracked open rooms in Joan’s personality she had been carefully keeping unaired and going to dust and moths. Not that Joan was angry with anyone but herself.

Harry was back with tea to save her from thinking any more about Sherlock, pouring her a cup and pushing it into her hands, then dropping into the armchair opposite her. With his knees spread and his elbows resting on them, he had a rough elegance which accounted for how attractive women found him, despite his awful suits. More fool them, Joan thought grimly.

“A long day?” he prompted.

“You know. Travelling. Train was awful.”

“I wouldn’t know, not like I get out of London much these days. Which does me just fine. What’s Newcastle like?”

“Full of people from Newcastle,” Joan said, and Harry laughed. For a moment, she smiled into her teacup, and then it faded.

She hadn’t been in Newcastle for months, of course. She had actually taken the train down from Manchester, having spent the best part of the day falling through thin air. Parachuting had, as Harding had said, been _good for a laugh_ —the wild, terrified laughter Joan otherwise associated with fast driving, setting pull-switches and the smack of skin on skin in a disused shower block—

She coughed, and shook her head while Harry pushed the plate of biscuits pointedly towards her. Crazy, to be sitting here having biscuits offered to her, when just this morning she had jumped out of a plane. She looked right into his eyes and considered everything that Harry didn’t know about her—even though he certainly knew some things about her that very few others did.

Sometimes, she wondered if it would have been easier on them both if they hadn’t known _some things_ about each other. It forced a grim sense of intimacy; made it that much more painful to be so different.

“So,” she said, and a loud thud from upstairs interrupted her. Harry’s hand jerked, his tea spilling all over the sleeve of his naff suit.

“Shit!”

“ _Language_ ,” she said, the word an automatic echo of their mother, shocked out of her by being in his presence. Like she didn’t use worse. “You alright?”

“Yes—ow—” He peeled off his jacket; the tea hadn’t reached the sleeve of his shirt below. “God, that didn’t come cheap...”

“You can wash it, Harry,” Joan said, taking the jacket off him and inspecting the stain. “What was that upstairs?”

“Nothing,” Harry said, which provoked an instant response of, “Oh Christ, what _was_ it?” from Joan, her eyebrows raising in alarm.

Harry licked his lips and looked earnestly, innocently worried in a way which made Joan’s heart sink and stomach churn. It was an expression which said _I can explain_ , and Joan tightened her grip on his jacket, fingers creasing the cheap fabric. Because he never could explain, was the thing. Oh, he could talk about it for hours, he could impart a deep and sincere sense that everything was accounted for and totally explicable, but when you were out of his presence you realised he had been talking about thin air.

“Harry—”

“Harry!”

The shout came from upstairs, muted and muffled and male.

Joan’s nostrils flared. Harry’s eyes snapped shut. “ _Oh_ ,” Joan said.

“It’s not—”

“It is, though, isn’t it. It actually is. In this neighbourhood, too. That’s brilliant, Harry, really.”

“Alright, yes,” Harry snapped, suddenly blazing, hands balling up into defiant fists at his sides—thumbs inside, like the bloody pacifist he was, Joan noted, because Harry had never hit anyone in his life. She set her jaw and looked away. “Yes, it’s a bloke in my bed. Was that what you wanted to hear, St Joan? His name’s Clarence and he’s—”

“I don’t want to know,” Joan said. “I...do not want to know, Harry. I just—” She cut herself off, exhaled, and folded her arms as she looked back to him. “You know what kind of area this is, don’t you?”

“Right, because anywhere else would be _so_ much safer.”

“Just don’t cause any rumours. Or worse. People go to _prison_ for less, Harry.”

She felt sick—with his irresponsibility, with her own hypocrisy, which she saw reflected back at her in Harry’s injured blue eyes. She swallowed hard, and wanted to say _I’m just worried about you_ , but she knew Harry found nothing more horrible.

There were footsteps coming down the stairs.

“Go on,” she said. “Sorry. Go on, I’ll stay in the kitchen and come out when you’ve stopped fighting.”

“We’re not fighting.”

“You always fight with your boyfriends,” Joan said, and stepped into the kitchen. She closed the door just as Harry turned, his hands braced anxiously on the back of his neck, and a pair of bare male feet came into view on the upper stairs.

Joan put the jacket over the back of a chair and sighed, looking around. The kitchen was a mess, of course. She put the jacket on the counter, and reminded herself to tell Harry how to clean it properly, then started running the tap to drown out the sounds of quiet voices from the next room. There was a whole stack of dirty dishes, and by the time Harry was poking his head around the door, she had halved it.

“Oh,” he said. “Ta.”

“No problem.”

“We didn’t have a row. Clarence’s gone out.”

“Great,” Joan said, and dried her hands on a tea towel to steel herself. “Hope he got dressed first. Look, Harry, er. I’m sorry for blowing up. There’s something I wanted to ask you.”

“Yeah, ask away,” Harry said absently, wandering back into the front room and leaving Joan with her request on her lips but unwilling to shout through the wall. She opened her mouth, then frowned, wondering for a sudden, irritable second if he expected her to do the rest of his dishes. Coming to the conclusion that he probably did made it marginally easier to stride out of the kitchen and state her demands.

She put her hands on the back of the armchair she had been sitting in earlier, not willing to be sucked down by the cushions again. “Not a question. More a request. I’m not staying here, but over the weekend, you’re probably going to get a call.”

Harry lowered the half-empty cup of tea he had returned to, his face paling. His profession was not one in which receiving calls was promising. “What,” he said. “What’ve you _done_ , do you mean—”

“I don’t mean the police, you—no, I mean a phone call, Harry. Just one. I’m not asking much.” If she said it with enough certainty, she might believe it. “It’ll be from a man named Major Andrew Harding of the Inter Services Research Bureau, probably. Or someone representing him. He’ll ask for me, because he thinks I’m staying here. Say I’m out, take a message, and call me—uh, on this number.” 

She reached into her pocket and held out a slip of paper—an old train ticket—on which there was a number in Sherlock’s mad, spidery handwriting; and the words _Montague Hotel_ ; and _Room 12, Janet and Charlotte Homer_. 

Harry looked down at the paper in his hands. Then he looked up to her. His mouth was tight, his eyes burning. Joan licked her lips, heartily sorry, suddenly, that she had made such a fuss about Harry’s Clarence.

“Joan,” he said, “what the bloody hell is this? Are you going AWOL?”

“No,” Joan said, her voice quiet and non-committal. “I’ve got weekend leave. I just—don’t have a totally accurate sleeping-out pass.”

“And you gave them this address?” Harry got to his feet, and Joan dropped her hands from the back of the chair and straightened up, folding her arms. “It’s not even my house! It’s Clarence’s!”

Joan pressed her lips together and looked up to the ceiling. “Yes. Sorry. Look, it’ll be fine, they aren’t going to check. Just say I’ve been sleeping in your front room and that I’ve run out to the shops for a bit.”

“So where are you really going to be sleeping?” Harry demanded, brandishing the slip of paper in her direction. He was flushed, his eyebrows wrenched upwards in disbelief.

“The hotel’s in Paddington,” Joan said, quietly and woodenly, knowing that wasn’t really what he was trying to ask her. Harry dropped his arm.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Joan,” he said.

Joan set her jaw and stared straight ahead, not responding. She would have to agree, after all.

“This is the problem with you,” Harry said, tossing the piece of paper down onto the coffee table and shoving his hand through his sunny hair in a frenzied motion.“This is the exact problem and it always bloody has been. You’re so bloody good all the time you can’t stand it. You don’t do nothing wrong for years at a time, and it builds up inside you and then suddenly you bugger off to France with some woman what calls herself _Persephone_ —”

“Persie,” Joan said quietly.

“—or you do this. So which one are you? Charlotte or Janet? I s’pose you’re saying you’re sisters.”

“I suppose so.”

“So you’re misleading an army bigshot because you want to bugger off to a hotel with some—”

“Keep your voice down.”

“Some woman.”

Joan stared at Harry’s shoes. The leather was cracked, brown, shiny, unpleasant. “With a friend,” she corrected, voice cool and restrained.

Yes; she wanted to bugger off a hotel with a _friend_. That _friend_ had suggested it to her while they were clinging to each other on the floor of a disused shower block, while Joan was still shaking from her orgasm.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Joan had groaned into Sherlock’s hair, after Sherlock had outlined her plan. “We’d never get away with that.”

“I do it all the time. My sister takes my calls, I leave the number of my hotel with her, she passes on my messages. You could do the same with yours. I’m sure she’d like to hear you were having fun.”

Joan had groaned again, almost explained—and then swallowed—and laughed, because God; it could work, couldn’t it?

Or so it had seemed, at least, with her arms full of Sherlock, their chests pressed together, skin slick with sweat and both of them racked with giggles. Now, in the glare of the daylight—

It was suddenly undeniable, alarming. Real. She was back in this life—making discreet arrangements, using once more that private, knowing language in which _friends_ weren’t, gritting her jaw defiantly against Harry’s disbelief—for all the time she had spent trying to pry it out of her nature, here she was doing it again.

Harry dropped his hands, the fight going out of him—going flat. His slump drew Joan’s gaze, even though she wanted to keep looking away from him, as if that could preserve her from actually being involved in the situation. He stared at her with downtrodden blue eyes, putting his trembling hands in the pockets of his trousers. He looked away from her, then back, and said, “Oh, Joan.”

“I’m fine,” Joan said, rubbing her hand through her hair. “I’m sorry about what I said about Clarence. I know it’s—I know.”

“Oh, _Joan_.”

* * *

It was on the platform at Manchester London Road, sitting with her knee against Joan’s and closing her eyes against the shouts and the clamour of the crowd, that Sherlock began to feel her nerves stretch and her heart yearn, in earnest, for privacy.

The slickness between her shirt and her body was uncomfortable; each breeze which blew along the platform made the fabric of her uniform flutter against her skin, sticking damply to her. She could feel the vibrations of an oncoming train—not theirs—and snippets of conversation flickered around her: “...get your money’s worth when it comes down to it...” “...sister had a baby but...” “...gorgeous nurse, I’d get flu again in a heartbeat...” There was the reek of smoke and oil and hot metal. She inhaled, and could map out the platform in her mind, a moving picture behind her eyelids. There was a thrum of hard, dusty energy in the air. A shared heartbeat.

Life was pressing in on her, compressed her, buzzing noisily in her ears and crawling over her skin, and Joan’s knee against hers seemed the focal point of the world.

She threw open her eyes. “I’ve got to make a call,” she announced, straightening up, and she felt Joan tense slightly without saying anything.

The FANY officer whom Harding had put in charge of shepherding the women down to London—only being obliged to complete three jumps, they were taking an earlier train than the men—shot to her feet. She was a thin, rigid woman with an handsome mouth hitched in a perpetual sneer, and Sherlock was almost sure Harding hadn’t been joking when he introduced her as Subaltern Pleasant. “To whom?” she inquired, nostrils quivering.

Sherlock paused in her path towards the wall-mounted telephone long enough to raise an eyebrow downwards at her, enjoying the slight alarmed pucker of the mouth which her stare produced. “My sister,” she said. “I’m staying with her, she needs to know when I’ll be coming in.” She did wonder why it would matter—though she had counted on being asked.

“Just you be careful what you say,” Pleasant said in an absurdly ominous tone, and Sherlock rolled her eyes as she stepped by her. “What was that, Holmes?”

“Yes ma’am,” Sherlock called, in a carrying drawl, then started hammering coins into the slot. She cinched the receiver between her chin and shoulder and glanced over at Joan, who was watching her.

Sherlock fumbled a farthing and it rang out like a bell as it hit the ground and spun. The RAF corporal who bent to pick it up for her smiled as he handed it over, but she snatched it off him without a word, leaving him looking frozen and stung as she pulled away from him.

Stupid. Stupid. 

“Number please?” the operator rapped out rather sternly, her voice tinny and fizzing on the line. Sherlock reeled off the number, and was told to please wait while she was connected. The receiver hummed, beeped, spluttered, and rang a little more.

“Hullo, you’ve reached the Montague Hotel,” the woman on the end of the line announced when she picked up after two rings. Her telephone voice was too polished around the edges, and not quite sharp enough on the vowels. She leant on her Hs, determined to get them all in. Sherlock smiled faintly. “How can I help?”

“Hullo. Is there a twin room free for the weekend?”

Five minutes later Sherlock finished scrawling on the back of a discarded ticket for yesterday’s twelve-twenty from York, said, “Thanks,” and replaced the receiver. She tucked the ticket into her pocket and sauntered back to where Pleasant was looming over Sally, Molly and Joan. “Mycroft’s furious because I’m arriving too late for lunch and too early for supper,” she remarked. “It’s like she doesn’t know there’s a war on.”

Joan gave her a sidelong look, but didn’t say a word; just smiled briefly and privately at nothing when she thought Sherlock wasn’t watching her, though she always was.

Pleasant accompanied them on the train down to London, keeping her face turned stiffly away from the RAF men who took up the standing space in their compartment and tried unsuccessfully to get Molly to look up from her newspaper. It was jolting, hot and horrible, and Sherlock thought she might suffocate in her attempts to do a decent impression of her normal self.

Joan sat across from her, pretending to read a newspaper and really looking at Sherlock’s legs. Sherlock experimented a few times to be sure of it. She crossed them, and watched Joan’s eyelashes flicker rapidly, her eyes darting back down to the same column she had been perusing for twenty minutes now. It made something in her—flutter, spark. She had licked her lips before she knew it—uncrossed her legs, recrossed them—watched Joan blink and clear her throat and—

Sherlock inhaled deep through her nose and slumped backwards, letting her head loll back. She swallowed, closed her eyes, and tried to breathe out this sudden, frightening _need_. Knowing, of course, that she couldn’t.

And damn it all, what was the solution that her brain was now proposing to her? — _Joan_.

Her mind had a history of suggesting illogical solutions. Nembutal. Dexedrine. Not eating, not sleeping. Trying to give Mycroft the silent treatment, when all Mycroft wanted from Sherlock was silence, stillness, calm. And now, the latest in line: Joan Watson, of the sandy hair and cleft chin. Of the gun and the blue eyes and, “Your choice.”

For all that Joan did to her—all the clutter and the confusion of being so distracted by her, so hinged upon her—Sherlock could think of no better solution to all this mess than to be alone with her, in a room with a locked door.

She kept that thought in her head as the train clattered towards London, shaking off the industrial north. Just that thought; chaste, plain, with no extra details. It saved her from too much worrying, rose up white and virginal in her mind. A room with a locked door; enough.

* * *

The train was coming into Guildford. Sherlock’s eyes snapped open. She stood, the train shuddered, and one of the RAF men caught her helpfully around the waist from behind—

(she could, of course, stamp on his instep, snap her foot up backwards to his groin, unpry his fingers, smash his face with her elbow in the best tradition of Captain Fairbanks and fast getaways in her schooldays at La Chassotte; Joan was already standing up, and Sherlock wondered which of them she was looking to protect)

—but, “Careful, Aircraftwoman,” he said, and she murmured, “Your mother still prefers your brother, even if he is a conscientious objector. _Careful_ , Sergeant.”

While he was staggering back from her, she reached up to take her suitcase from the racks overhead, and Joan’s hands met hers on the handle. She looked at her sharply. The train jolted to a stop.

“See you later, Sherlock,” Joan said, her voice very quiet and her eyes very blue. Then she released the suitcase into Sherlock’s hands.

“Monday,” said Sherlock, and Joan said, “Yeah.”

The way the feeling of her skin lingered almost made Sherlock forget her aim. Then she snapped back into the real world and tightened her grip, trying to make her fingers stop tingling, and not really wanting them to. “You dropped something,” she said. While Joan was frowning and bending for the ticket Sherlock had let flutter to the floor, Sherlock left the compartment, and then the train.

While the train was still in the station and Sherlock could feel Pleasant’s stare between her shoulderblades, she headed straight for the taxi rank. There, for the benefit of Harding, just in case he should suddenly bloom into thoroughness and competence, she snapped at a driver’s proposed fair and flounced back into the station to demand to know whether he was trying to rip her off. Assured that the driver’s rate was reasonable and legal, and assured that if asked about a tall, dark-haired, disagreeable WAAF, the ticket seller would raise her eyebrows and give a full report including the fact that she had been dead set on getting to Sherrinford House before supper, Sherlock stomped off and slumped into the back of the cab.

There, she maintained a sulky silence before suddenly insisting that she had changed her mind; that she had to go to a railway station. The closest one, please. She couldn’t face going back to that place, she said with sudden abstraction. She’d go and stay with her friends in London. Only he wouldn’t tell, would he?

The driver droned that he wouldn’t tell, miss, no, his voice flat and irritated.

Good, because she would be a terribly ineffectual runaway otherwise.

She might have felt embarrassed about the sheer level of inanity she was projecting, but it hardly mattered; it was just misdirection, and she had faith in her real purpose. Twittering over, Sherlock was deposited at a railway station on the opposite side of town to the one she had just alighted from, where she quietly bought a ticket to Waterloo. From there she took a taxi to Paddington, all with the sense of having something caught in her chest which the barest whisper of breath might dislodge. A secret too fragile to even look at.

It was a case of being so electrified that she burned brighter and more evenly than anything in the vicinity. She felt tuned in, switched-on, calm. She grabbed her suitcase from the back of the cab and slammed the door behind her, striding off. The cobbles flew beneath her feet.

It was nothing, really, but a game of Find The Lady, with herself cast as the Queen and Harding the unsuspecting mark, a game she had played once or twice the other way around—letting men on street corners usher her over and ask her to watch the cards, and then alarming them by following every sleight of hand and flicker of the wrist and walking away once she was bored, or had won enough to keep her in cigarettes for a few days. Easy. Simple. A matter of misdirection.

It thrilled her anyway, not least because there was another card in play in the form of Joan Watson. Curious, how Joan could be such a thrill, even while she was—and Sherlock couldn’t help but think it, the words soaring into her mind and buoying her up before she could sneer or shudder—a solace, a sanctuary.

The hotel was a horrible white lump, paint peeling from its skin. Sherlock didn’t care. Inside it was no better, with greying carpet and embarrassed-looking flowers on every hard-scrubbed surface. The woman behind the desk had fine, tired eyes and a faint smile which trembled on her mouth. Love letters to a man at the front, Sherlock thought, casting a cursory glance over her inky forefinger. She called Sherlock _Miss Homer_ and waved towards balding stairs. “Thanks,” said Sherlock, making up a signature on the spot. “Oh, Janet’s not here yet? She’s awfully late.”

The receptionist definitely responded, and Sherlock definitely listened, but then she mentally binned the response, judging it to be a waste of her time.

She turned and looked almost blindly up the stairs, suddenly realising what she had organised; what lay for her at the top of them. The porter reached for her case, which Sherlock was still holding at her side; when she let him take it, he yelled, “Blimey!” and tipped sideways, having to steady himself quickly against the bannister.

“Ah,” she said.

“You were holding it like it was nothing, I thought it’d be light!” he croaked, and Sherlock scrunched her features into an expression she thought might be apologetic.

The expression didn’t feel right, though, and she quickly discarded it, snatching her case back with a muttered approximation of, “Never mind.” 

Her pulse carried on a steady beat. She climbed the stairs alone, reached room twelve alone, and unlocked the door with a perfectly steady hand. 

The room was white and blue, faintly antiseptic, with a desk and chair shoved up against the window and two single beds set primly parallel. Slightly skewed rectangles of light lay on the carpet, illuminating how old it was. There was a certain convent air to it. The open window let in the blare of the street below, and the breeze couldn’t distract from the fierce white smell of cleanliness and artificial lavender. A single strand of someone else’s hair was lying on the floor, half against the skirting-board, buffeted a little by the wind as it skittered through the room.

Sherlock, her back against the closed door, thought it might have been the most exciting thing she had ever seen.

She had to get out of her uniform. Right now. She didn’t want to close the curtains, so she threw open the wardrobe door to shield her from the open window and revelled in undressing in the light and the breeze, feeling illicit and breathless, aware of every inch of her skin. She curled her bare toes against the scrubby carpet, turned her face up and pushed her hands through her hair; working out bobby pins which hadn’t been doing much in the first place. She bent and slid them onto the cuff of her discarded shirt so as not to lose them, then straightened up.

It was tempting to not put anything on. She was oddly conscious of her body as _a place where Joan’s hands had been_. She ran her hands down her sides, over her jutting hips, thinking, _here is where she gripped me_ —and up again to her breasts— _and where she_ pinched _me_. Her nipples were like pebbles against her palms, and she swallowed, shoving her tongue around her dry mouth—but she was standing in the middle of a hotel room feeling herself up, and frankly it was stupid. She snatched up civvies from her suitcase. A skirt and blouse and a pair of knickers. They’d do. The important fact was that she was officially out of her uniform—no longer covered by convention or governed by rules.

Two beds meant one shared bedside table, standing between them. Sherlock grabbed it, dragged it and finally, with a pleased little huff of effort, shoved it out into the middle of the room—so hard, in fact, that it spun a little and knocked against the wardrobe. A Gideon Bible went _clunk_ in the drawer. Sherlock smiled. Then she untucked the top sheets, flipped them up so as not to get them trapped with her next move, hopped neatly over one of the beds, braced her hands against its side, and pushed. Until the gap between them was closed.

There. Much better, not least because the prim, almost military order of the room had now been seriously disrupted. Sherlock sauntered barefoot to the desk chair and surveyed her work with a thoughtful lick of her lips, drumming her fingers once on the arms. Then she set aside her body and a small part of her mind with instructions to watch the door, leaving the rest of her brain free.

Joan—Joan—Joan. If she closed her eyes (and she wouldn’t; had to watch the door) she could still see Joan’s body rippling in the shadows, the darkness flooding each dip and dimple of her fresh, damp skin. And the tangerine light like a sunset, fizzing and setting light to all the places the shadow couldn’t touch. She didn’t have to close her eyes to remember Joan gulping and groaning against her neck, her wet, wet mouth. 

So that, then, was what people treated with such terrifying awe. That was sex—Joan pushing her fingers into Sherlock up to the knuckle, in and out until Sherlock was shoving and twisting to the rhythm—sex, the obscene, wet noises, sucking and slicking—sex, the thick, bright sea-salt taste of Joan, wet and ripe, finding hair caught in her teeth after—sex, Joan laughing damply into Sherlock’s shoulder, and the heat, the sweat, the burning, rutting, moaning, the final flare and shudder and choke; the slow, soft fall, interrupted by shocks as her muscles clenched—and clenched—again. And being so—open.

She had never been so open in her life. She hadn’t known she could be. So was that—frightening, or exciting?

There were footsteps on the landing outside. Sherlock resumed connection with her body with such suddenness that it was like an electric shock, and almost jumped to her feet as the door cracked open, but restrained herself and gripped the arms of her chair instead.

Joan came in, eyebrows raised and face creased, her lips curving in an uncertain smile which looked, to Sherlock, really, terribly—terribly beautiful.

She was still in service dress. Her corporal’s stripe was now sewn on properly with tiny, delicate stitches; not for the first time Sherlock thought of what a good doctor Joan would have made. She looked neat, reserved, like she always did when she was unwillingly in a skirt; not uncomfortable, but holding herself back somehow. The sleeves of her tunic were crumpled.

For a moment, there was a teetering, breathless silence. Then:

“You did your sister’s washing up?” Sherlock said, the words bursting from her desperately, a little incredulous, a little indignant—a little terrified by the idea of saying any of the other things which seemed to be packed tight into the silence between them.

The tension drained slightly. Joan’s shoulders lowered, though she still looked a little awkward as she opened her mouth, closed it again, and shrugged, looking around the room. Finally, a smile stirred, faint and fond, on her mouth. She wasn’t looking at Sherlock. “Yes and no. You’ve—redecorated, I see.”

“I’ve—” Sherlock echoed to give herself time, following Joan’s gaze—to the beds she had pushed together. The bed, singular, perhaps.

Her heart plummeted, her hands suddenly clammy. Stupid. Dear God. And she had thought she was being so _clever_. “Yes,” she said mechanically. “Well, I thought it—” _stop talking_ “— might be—” _stop_ “—practical.”

“It,” Joan said, and then miraculously, “it might be, yes.”

Sherlock looked hard at her. Joan was rubbing her hand through her hair and letting her mouth curve in that damned grin of hers, that baffled, admiring smile which crinkled her face. Sherlock felt _raised up_ , then bewildered by it, then just frustrated. 

But Joan just murmured, “It could come in handy.” Sherlock couldn’t think of anything to say to that (beyond, “Good, excellent, shall we,” which she wasn’t sure she could get the courage to shove out of her mouth) so she stayed quiet. Joan looked from the bed to her face one more time, and then finally asked, “If I ask about how you knew about the washing-up...?”

Sherlock blinked. There was the clicking of mental gears, and then she waved her hand, exhaling in a rush. “Oh, it’s nothing. You rolled your sleeves up earlier and there’s a spot of damp on your tie.”

“Knew it’d be something like that,” Joan murmured, and seemed on the verge of taking a step towards her—but instead she stopped, and lifted her suitcase up onto the bed, springing the hinges. Sherlock, who had tensed in anticipation, almost rising, settled down again with slight irritation, wondering what on earth she was looking for in her case.

Not wanting to experience another crammed, nervous silence, she kept talking. “I assume your sister isn’t a hydrophobe—”

“Brother,” Joan said. “Actually.”

Sherlock stared at her. Shaped the word with her mouth. It wasn’t enough. “Brother,” she said, wonderingly, with defeat, slumping back in her chair. “ _Brother_. There’s always _something_ —”

“So, you know, I was doing the dutiful thing, because he’s—a born bachelor,” Joan was muttering, apparently more to herself than Sherlock, taking a stack of folded clothes from her suitcase and—bizarrely, Sherlock thought—putting them away in the wardrobe with a tense, single-minded calm. “But, yes. Harry. Nickname for Henry, not Harriet.”

“But the— _oh_ ,” Sherlock said, closing her eyes and dropping her head back, filling her lungs with air and feeling the facts flutter blissfully into place. Distracted, for the moment, from the problem of everything they weren’t talking about. “Oh, of _course_. Stupid of me. He’s a spiv, not just a black market customer. Hence why he has access to that perfume, and why you take all that so personally.”

“Sherlock,” Joan said, and Sherlock’s eyes flickered open, eyebrows raising.

“Wasn’t I right?” she asked, and Joan opened her mouth but then just sighed and snatched up her washbag to put it by the sink in the corner of the room. Sherlock, satisfied with this assurance, nodded, and said, “Of course I was.” She flicked her hand through the air as if batting away the sheer obviousness of the idea, when another obvious thought came to her mind and her lips in the same moment. “And he’s queer, too.”

Joan stopped, and pressed her lips together. 

She was side-on to Sherlock, standing by her suitcase again. Sherlock saw her hands fold slowly over the side of the case, and her tongue wet her lips.

“Brilliant, Sherlock, yeah,” she said, in a colourless voice.

Sherlock, gone slightly cold, said, “If you’re so alarmed by the fact—”

“I’m not,” Joan said, grabbing another armful of clothes and moving mechanically to the wardrobe. “I’m not alarmed by the fact. I’m _alarmed_ by the idea of my brother going to prison for gross indecency. Or possibly black market dealing. Whichever they catch him out on first, really, I mean the odds are pretty much even—” She shut the wardrobe door hard, almost slammed it, and closed her eyes, her hand resting against the wood.

For a few moments, Sherlock just watched her shoulders move as she breathed, and pressed her teeth together to stop herself from saying anything. It would only end badly.

“Sorry,” Joan said eventually, quietly. “Sorry. How did you even know? If it was the perfume, then—”

“No, don’t be absurd. One perfumed letter hardly a homosexual makes,” Sherlock said, exhaling in a long rush and trying to make it sound exasperated rather than relieved. Her heart was hammering erratically, jumping in her chest, but it seemed rather far away from what she was saying and doing; alright, she didn’t really know what she was meant to be doing, but she had found a strand of conversation to follow. It would do to stave off the silence. “It was you.”

Joan finally looked at her. “Me.”

“Yes, you,” Sherlock said, more subdued than she had meant to sound, rubbing two fingers at her temple and suddenly horribly conscious of her own body language. “Obviously, you.”

“How?”

“Because I mistook your brother for a sister and you didn’t correct me,” Sherlock said, dropping her hand and forcing herself not to fidget. “Quite clearly you were unwilling to cast aspersions on your brother’s masculinity in case I should come to any inconvenient conclusions. But now you’ve admitted the truth, now that, ah—” Joan’s gaze sharpened slightly and Sherlock finally glanced away, fingers curling and uncurling in thin air “—now that I, too, am occupying certain social, moral and legal grey areas,” she finished, formal and clumsy for all her delicacy.

“Or,” Joan said, “I could just trust you more now that I know you.”

Sherlock blinked at the wall, fingers stilling. She turned her head, but by the time Joan was in her field of vision again she had turned to push the bedside table around to the side so that it was no longer sitting awkwardly in the middle of the room, and was opening its drawer to put away her torch and housewife sewing kit.

She was apparently totally oblivious of what she had just said. 

She should ask what she meant, Sherlock knew. Or ask if she meant it. If she trusted her, really and truly. Instead she snapped, “What are you _doing_?”

“Unpacking?” Joan said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, instead of the most frustratingly baffling.

“Dear God,” Sherlock said, slumping backwards and pushing her hands through her hair, closing her eyes. “We’re here for two nights. Live out of your case. You’re only making more work for yourself.”

In the blackness behind her eyelids, Sherlock could hear the sudden silence of Joan ceasing to move, stopping—Sherlock thought—in her tracks, and looking straight at her.

Expecting it didn’t stop something inside Sherlock from clenching when she opened her eyes and immediately met Joan’s gaze. “What,” she said, and Joan shook her head. Her shoulders were lowered, her fingers slack, and she looked oddly tired. “What?” Sherlock insisted.

“Nothing,” Joan said, smile rippling crookedly into place and making Sherlock’s toes curl in her shoes. “Really, nothing, I was just—kicking myself, actually.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Joan said, moving closer with a sort of stiff determination in every line of her body, “I’m not sure we’ve ever been in a alone in a room before without a time limit or some kind of reason to watch the door.”

“That one locks upon closing,” Sherlock said quietly, settling back in her chair and watching Joan with a quiet, wary interest, hope and curiosity stirring inside of her.

“Noticed that,” Joan agreed, and put a hand on the back of Sherlock’s chair to lean over the desk and reach up to the window. Sherlock turned her whole body to watch her. “Just going to close the curtains.”

“Alright.”

“Maybe the window, too.”

“Good idea.”

“Sorry, this is always awkward the first few times. Can I—”

“Yes, _obviously_ —”

Joan bent and kissed her, of course. It was predictable, and meant to happen; after the previous night it was, barring mishaps, a foregone conclusion. So there was no reason for it to be such a jarring shock, for Sherlock’s nerves to suddenly jolt and flicker to life all at the same time like bulbs on a switchboard. She breathed in sharply through her nose, chest filling with air—she was bursting, and she pressed her mouth hard up against Joan’s and grabbed at the hair at the back of Joan’s head, her reaction like a sudden, involuntary reflex—. 

“Damn,” she said suddenly, forcefully, angrily, wrenching her mouth away, and Joan started back with surprise.

“You okay?” she asked, and Sherlock remembered her panting those same words into the back of her neck, over and over, as her fingers—Sherlock swallowed, coloured, raised her head up haughtily.

“Just fine,” she said, not to be outdone, feeling a thrill of defiance mingling with want.

She leaned up to kiss Joan again. Joan’s mouth moved softer against hers this time, no matter how she tried to urge her into roughness. She wasn’t, in truth, sure how to do what Joan did, and kiss slowly, evenly, one press of the lips after another—at least, not right now. She had fallen into a slower rhythm last night, it was true. It had been much easier then, in the sticky heat and the electric crackle of the torchlight, to relent. Now, everything new and bright and freshly complex, all Sherlock could think to do was throw herself into it—to lick into Joan’s mouth, bite her lips, push her hands against her shoulders.

“Easy,” Joan muttered, and Sherlock felt stung even as Joan’s fingers stroked over her forehead, pushing her hair gently off her face, making her feel—what? Sherlock didn’t know. “Are you—”

“Oh for God’s sake, if you ask me if I’m alright again I’ll stay with my sister after all,” Sherlock snapped, her voice a little thick.

Joan abruptly started giggling. Sherlock blinked. “Oh God,” Joan groaned, leaning her forehead against Sherlock’s.

“What?”

“You know for a while,” Joan said weakly, “I, er, I was fairly convinced you’d made up your sister in order to have an excuse to keep visiting London. I just remembered, and thought—but I s’pose she’s definitely real, is she?”

Sherlock stared at her, and said, “ _Yes_ ,” without any breath at all, because she had already started to laugh along with Joan. Sherlock joining in only seemed to spur on Joan, who pushed her face into Sherlock’s hair with a veritable cackle, and Sherlock thought that maybe—it would be alright, all of this.

Finally Joan straightened up, and she pulled Sherlock with her so that they were standing toe to toe, chest to chest. Joan’s hands settled at her hips. It seemed easier, now, to move together. Joan’s movements all seemed to produce natural responses in Sherlock, as if she had finally stumbled upon the code which would let her unscramble Joan’s signals and read the unencrypted plain text. Her heart was still juddering in her chest, and it was a struggle to decide where to put her hands, but she was less frantic. The remaining lightheaded breathlessness helped, perhaps. Sherlock thought of Joan not believing in Mycroft and experienced an aftershock of her giggling fit, twitching a little in Joan’s arms as Joan’s fingers scrunched up the fabric of her skirt.

“You’re an idiot,” she said.

“You’re a maniac,” Joan retorted, kissing her once, a full, sweet, short kiss. “I—was thinking, last night.”

“I should hope so,” Sherlock said, swallowing hard, her pulse thrumming and leaping. Joan was slowly, so slowly, pulling Sherlock’s skirt up.

“Shut up. I was thinking that I wanted to see you.” She was watching Sherlock’s face carefully, her hands on the backs of her thighs—up under her skirt. Sherlock realised she was watching for a reaction, and realised, too, that she had no idea what her face was doing. Her mouth was slightly open, she knew that, and from the prickle of heat along her cheeks, she had to be flushed. Certainly she was hot. Excited. Excited all over.

“You have seen me,” she pointed out, again haughtily. Joan grinned.

“Yeah,” she admitted. “But I didn’t get to undress you.”

“Oh,” said Sherlock.

Joan’s fingers were quick and deft at the buttons of her skirt, and then with one hand she unbuttoned Sherlock’s blouse. The other hand she pushed between Sherlock’s legs, making her gasp, grab at Joan’s shoulders for support, as Joan moved the cotton of her underwear against her, stroked her through it. Rough and unceremonious and, _oh_ , good, startlingly so. “ _Joan_ ,” Sherlock hissed, eyes wide and cheeks heating, and Joan flushed, grinned, offered an unapologetic, “Sorry,” as she hooked a finger in Sherlock’s knickers to pull them down. They slipped down to Sherlock’s ankles. 

“Don’t be,” Sherlock said, her voice croaky and hard, demanding. She had the pleasure of feeling Joan stiffen slightly, exhale slowly against her throat, just before Sherlock stepped out of her underwear and stood back to survey her.

Joan was standing in her blouse and skirt, having discarded her tunic—and dropped it, for all her earlier determined tidiness, onto the floor. Gorgeous. _Gorgeous_. Sherlock reached for Joan’s tie, Joan reached for Sherlock’s hair, and they fit together, each catching the other’s momentum perfectly as they swung into the kiss. Joan’s tongue swiped into Sherlock’s mouth, and Sherlock made a hot, muffled noise, fingers clenching around Joan’s tie as she yanked her closer, sucked her lower lip on a messy, needy impulse.

“Bed,” Joan said.

“You have the occasional wonderful idea,” Sherlock said, totally sincerely. When Joan laughed, she wasn’t sure why. Then there was the rustle of Joan’s blouse coming off and the skitter of her bra hitting the floor, and then with a heavy thump Sherlock’s head hit the pillows, and she was dragging Joan into place atop her, leaning up clumsily to mouth at one of Joan’s rosy nipples. Her breasts overspilled her hands, soft and pale. Sherlock felt Joan’s moan vibrate right through her sternum and through Sherlock herself, robbing her of her breath—oh _God_. She had groped her inexpertly last night, but it was different like this—nuzzling, panting, with the thud of Joan’s heart just inches away from her face. She pushed her cheek along one smooth, warm side-swell, swallowed hard, made a whimpering noise she didn’t fully understand into the damp valley between Joan’s breasts.

“Christ,” Joan was saying, laughing, groaning, her fingers in Sherlock’s hair, “Christ, I was planning on laying you out, and—not—”

“You don’t like this?” Sherlock said, confused, stiffening, ready to wriggle out from under her, but Joan said, “Are you _kidding_?” and Sherlock sighed in relief, falling back so that her head was against the pillow again and pulling Joan down towards her.

They kissed, and Sherlock revelled in how she could push the heels of her hand up Joan’s sides, across her back, how she could feel Joan’s ribs against the insides of her forearms. There was a startling safety in the press of their bodies. The hot, painful, staggering fact of skin on skin. Arms around her. Sherlock wanted—wanted—she didn’t know. She broke the kiss with a wet, gulping sound, shoving her face into the crook of Joan’s neck. The serge of Joan’s skirt scrubbed against Sherlock’s bare thighs, rough and scratchy, and Sherlock’s bare foot slid down Joan’s stocking-covered calf, her toes pressing against Joan’s ankle. It was astonishing; produced in Sherlock not just arousal but slack-jawed amazement which left her thinking _how—what—how?_ to the beat of her own heart.

She had fallen back again, breathing air instead of skin. Her chest jumping with every breath, her eyes wide and her head tipped so far backwards that her neck was arched. Joan was kissing down her body, kissing the strangest places. Sherlock gasped, blinked hard at the ceiling, for a moment seeing double images of the crack in the plaster above her head, as Joan traced light— _light_ patterns over her stomach with her tongue—was that— _normal_? What an absurd idea, what a _good_ idea—

Her hips were lifting, and she was saying, demanding really, “ _Talk_ to me.”

“Christ,” Joan said, “I’m not actually that good at that—” If it hadn’t been for how her mouth was pressed up against the lower part of Sherlock’s stomach, and how the rumble of her voice sparked through her like an electric shock, made her gasp and squirm, ticklish—if it hadn’t been for how her fingers were pressing into Sherlock’s thighs—if it hadn’t been for all of that, Sherlock might actually have kneed her in the shoulder and told her she was an idiot, but instead she just struggled to control her breathing, fingers clenching and unclenching in the cheap sheets.

“Spread,” Joan said. “Let me see.” And Sherlock did.

She closed her eyes, conscious of Joan’s breathing, how her fingers tightened and then loosened on her thighs, stroking up the white, exposed insides. She was shaking, Sherlock realised. They were both shaking—and a burst of hot air hit her cunt, made her moan.

Before she had stopped, Joan was licking her, from the cleft of her arse to her swollen clit. Lewd, lengthy, _savouring_. And Sherlock’s mind whited out, shut down; she was struggling, bucking, her heels slipping against the sheets and her fingers scrabbling. “Oh,” she said, “oh, _Joan_ , ah—”

She had to shut up. She was whimpering, kicking and bracing her feet against the mattress and making the bedsprings complain—a cacophony of creaking, whining noise. Had to stop. _Stop_. She hauled in her breath and swallowed, setting her jaw so that only noisy inhales and exhales could escape her. She remembered doing this for Joan. Her mouth had been wet, salty, full of her as she lapped clumsily and needily at her, rough curls scraping her lips and cheeks. Had Joan felt like this? The soft-soft-soft press of a mouth there and the giving push of a tongue, the shocks of blind want which were crashing through her? Had she—for Joan—given her that?

She was stretching upwards, straining upwards, feeling waves of pleasure coming in and out and in and out, harder each time—she was grabbing handfuls of Joan’s hair—tiny, hard breaths were jerking in her chest, forcing themselves out of her mouth—and she clamped down her teeth against crying out, afraid to cry out—

—and in the hard, gasping, choking, sighing silence, there was the needy bleating of a telephone. 

The distraction shattered Sherlock’s concentration on staying quiet—and she loosened her grip on Joan’s hair—but it was no good, she was already coming, wracked by hard physical spasms but with no thought in her mind but _who the hell is that_ , gasping—

“I—oh—God, I hate— _hate_ —!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Chapter 12'll be here on Monday the 16th of September. 
> 
> **"only being obliged to complete three jumps"** \- Male SOE trainee agents completed four training jumps, with their fifth jump being operational; I know this because Pearl Witherington, a female SOE agent, fought for years to get her parachute wings, which are normally awarded after five jumps. She, of course, had only completed four, including parachuting into bleeding France. [She got them in the end, though](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4898302.stm). (She also has a fascinating story, even for an SOE agent; she became more of a paramilitary leader than an intelligence officer or a saboteur).
> 
>  **"Find the Lady"** \- Three Card Monte. Marks are wooed into a false sense of security by a simple card shuffle where they have to 'follow' the Queen, make a bet once they feel confident and then lose it when the dealer uses sleight of hand and misdirection. (Just explaining this because I think it might be a Britishism? Who knows.)
> 
>  **"a spiv"** \- Any kind of black market dealer, though most typically low-level; the archetypical spiv is a Cockney chap with a lot of patter and plenty of American nylons in a back room somewhere.


	12. Hate—Hate!

“I—oh—God, I hate— _hate_ —!”

With Sherlock’s hands tight in her hair, Joan couldn’t move away, and nor did she think it would exactly be fair to leave her when she could feel, against her tongue, how Sherlock was trembling and clenching. But the ’phone was yelling for attention, they were both startled, and Sherlock’s orgasm lasted only a second before her hips slumped down, her fingers loosened in Joan’s hair, and she let out a groan of dissatisfaction.

The telephone stopped shrieking, after just three rings.

Joan sat up, wiping her mouth, and muttered, “ _Christ_ , some people’s timing. Are you—” She didn’t finish her inquiry, stopped short by the expression on Sherlock’s face. Her eyes were closed, her teeth set so hard together than her jaw was trembling. One of her hands was locked into a tight fist, knuckles against her mouth. “Sherlock?”

“Shut up,” Sherlock said, her voice thick. “She’ll ring back in a—”

The telephone started up again, and Sherlock slammed her fist down against the mattress, making the whole bed bounce and shake, then scrambled upwards in a clatter of bare limbs. She flung herself across the room to the desk, and snatched up the receiver, hanging onto the chair for support. “Sherlock, what—” Her knees were shaking, Joan saw, as she watched from the bed.

“ _Yes_ ,” Sherlock growled into the receiver, and then her upper lip curled, twisted. Her knuckles were pale on the black Bakelite, and she looked almost sick, her face bloodless. “Oh—” It was one of her sneering _oh_ s, but aborted, her lips pressing hard together and her throat convulsing. “No,” she murmured, quiet and deadly. Then: “Fine.”

She hung up. Her long, spidery fingers quivered for a moment on the receiver before she dropped her hand, and stared unblinkingly into some private hell.

“Who was that?” Joan asked, very tentatively. 

“Mycroft,” Sherlock said, shoving herself away from the desk and lunging for her discarded clothes, snatching them up off the floor and starting to drag them on. Her fingers fumbled on her bra clasp, and Joan quickly got up to try and help her but had her hands pushed away for her trouble. “My _sister_.”

“But you told her to send your calls this way, didn’t you? What did she—”

“Nothing,” Sherlock said, and she was shaking wildly now, pulling on her blouse and shaking back her hair in a frenzy of movement, “she said _nothing_ , because there’s nothing Mycroft can do better than a superior silence—”

“Sherlock—”

“I—” Sherlock said, pushing almost blindly past Joan, “cannot _stand_ —” She made a harsh, guttural sound which sounded for all the world like she had just taken a punch to the stomach. It sounded breathless, wrenched out of her, animal, and Joan started towards her, but Sherlock whirled away out of her reach, stalking through the tiny room like a beast in a cage, the muscles in her long, nude legs pistoning as she tried to find her skirt with shaking hands. She was breathing noisily, her face entirely without colour and her eyes wide. Her voice was high, brittle, toxic. “She talks about _lessons learnt_ from 1939—” 

_What_ , Joan thought, numb, blank, _the Phoney War?_

“—as if she’s acting for my own good, as if anything matters to her beyond what effect I might have on her job—her Foreign Office position— _naturally_ she’s terribly busy there, but never busy enough to stop her from _meddling_ , every—” Sherlock turned “—damned—” she clutched her hair, clenched her teeth, screwed her eyes shut “— _time_ —”

With a sudden, violent movement, she slammed her hands against the side of the wardrobe and shoved it over.

“Jesus!” Joan yelled, jumping backwards, although she hadn’t been in the path of the wardrobe’s fall. It crashed to the ground with a resounding thud and a clatter of coat hangers falling inside it, the echo booming around the room.

One of the doors slowly sagged open, in a creaking anticlimax.

Joan stared at it, then at Sherlock, who was drained of all colour and shaking so violently it looked like she might actually be struggling to stand up, supporting herself with one hand against the wall. Her mouth was hidden behind her other wrist and her chest was heaving in and out with rattling speed, her breaths loud and almost panicked, her eyes wild and unseeing with an animal horror. She made a noise, muffled it in the heel of her hand. “Sherlock,” Joan said, and Sherlock shut her eyes tight, took a deep breath in—and this time held it.

Watching her come apart had made Joan’s throat crowd with horror, but watching her come together again wasn’t soothing. It was a sudden, unnerving process. Sherlock breathed in, slackened her muscles and raised her chin, her head like a snake’s answering to a pipe. She blinked the wild fear in her eyes back down to whatever locked cell inside her it had sprung from. The clearness which resurfaced in her gaze had an awful emptiness to it. She dropped her hands, which were still trembling but no longer wracked with the shaking spasms which had briefly overtaken her.

Joan stepped forwards, because she couldn’t very well justify stepping back, and with an unexpectedly fluid movement, Sherlock turned and glided away from her, plucking her skirt from where she had left it and fastening it at her waist. Then she stepped into her shoes, foregoing stockings. She moved in simple, sharp bursts of movement. Rehearsing normality. Her calves and ankles, visible beneath the hem of her skirt, were bright, obvious white, and, Joan knew from recent investigation, slightly stubbled with hairs too small to be visible, but rough against the palm. She clenched the hand which had run up her calf, not half an hour before. 

“Sherlock,” she said, uselessly, afraid. Her voice was too quiet, after the crash of the wardrobe.

“She was calling from the tea room opposite the hotel,” Sherlock said, reaching for the thick navy coat she insisted on wearing even in the blazing heat. Her voice sounded sore, like she had a bad cold or had hurt her throat yelling, but her words were clipped and calm. 

She took her cigarettes from the pocket and lit one. And then, restored to her usual sweeping, sharp-edged glory, with only the faintest waver of the cigarette in her hand and the fallen wardrobe remaining as evidence of her loss of control, she dropped two sentences into the silence: “And she said to bring my _friend_. Get dressed and come find us.”

The shock—the fear—slithered around Joan’s shoulders and hissed in her ear before it burrowed straight down into her chest, twisting and sliding and squeezing the breath out of her. Sherlock left.

Joan looked at the wardrobe.

She bent and extracted her civvies from it with the calm of a woman facing execution, and started changing her clothes. She could have put the blouse of her service dress back on again, but the idea of presenting herself to Mycroft Holmes in the very clothes (half of them, at least) she had been in while—

It didn’t seem quite right, and in any case, she wanted to get out of this nightmare of a skirt. Not to mention brush her teeth.

Ten minutes later, she was outside the hotel in slacks and an ancient leather jacket, with her mouth full of the taste of mint and her stomach full of a sick, greasy fear which made her feel hot and nauseated. She refused to focus on it, or on how the street rolled uneasily under her feet. 

None of it mattered. What was important was crossing the road and finding the tea room which the call had been placed from, because Joan knew two things for certain: one, that something about Sherlock’s sister made Sherlock angry enough to scare herself, and two, that they were currently alone with each other.

She wasn’t coming to anyone’s rescue, Joan told herself. She just wasn’t. She wouldn't know whose to come to.

The tea room was quiet, pale, pleasant, and full of the gentle clack of china and a burble of chatter. Music was playing on the wireless—a woman’s voice wavering merrily in the background, the tune familiar but the lyrics impossible to discern or remember. Sherlock’s long, dark figure, slumped in a chair near the back, was immediately out of place and immediately visible. But Joan’s eye was drawn to the woman sitting across from her, who sat with such neat poise that she might have been an illustration for a sewing pattern in a magazine aimed at professional ladies, all without looking like she had personally picked up a needle and thread in her life. She was taller than Sherlock, with a broader face and slightly lighter hair tamed into shiny, picture-perfect rolls, and a nose which curved downwards towards a thin, distasteful mouth—but her eyes had that same silvery paleness, and there was a strange, alien elegance common to them both.

Joan stopped in the doorway, and stared at them. Sherlock, wrapped up in her greatcoat but with her legs crossed and one of her low-heeled black shoes dangling obviously off her foot, turned her head and caught Joan’s gaze. There was no apology in it. There wasn’t even any suggestion of her anger; Sherlock looked returned to her baseline level of irritability. 

Joan raised her eyebrows, and Sherlock rolled her eyes—though not at Joan. As far as Joan could tell, at least. The message which pulsed between them—if she was reading it right—was _I’ve no idea either_.

Sherlock’s sister was looking at her, too, face adorned with a sort of pained, pressing smile, as if trying to ignore a persistent toothache—one which Joan was causing. Joan remembered that Sherlock referred to her as Mycroft, and made up her mind not to call her that until she was sure the name wasn’t either a joke, an insult or one of the strange nicknames women of Sherlock’s class were always mysteriously picking up.

There was an empty chair in between them. Joan steeled herself and walked over.

“You must be Corporal Watson,” said Mycroft Holmes. “So good to meet you. Do sit. We waited for you.”

“No, we didn’t,” said Sherlock irritably. “We sent back the first pot because there was a smudge on it and now we’re waiting for this one to brew.”

“ _Sherlock_ masterminded that particular complaint,” Mycroft said, giving Joan an amiable, ingratiating look which didn’t sit right on her face. She wasn’t beautiful like Sherlock, lacking her animal grace and vivid features, but she had the odd attraction of a piece of art. You could admire, at least, the effort which had gone into her design and production. “But I thought it better to wait. Shall I be mother?”

“Hold on,” said Joan, not taking her seat just yet. Instead she watched Mycroft as she reached for the teapot and set about pouring. “Hold on, sorry, Miss Holmes, didn’t you _call_ me?”

Mycroft’s eyebrows raised smoothly, though she kept her eyes on Sherlock’s cup as she filled it, then moved on to Joan’s. “I can’t imagine how I would have done that,” she murmured absently. “Milk, Corporal?” Joan just stared at her, and Mycroft stared guilelessly back at her before saying, “I’ll let you fix it,” and pouring her own cup.

Joan sat down, totally numb. There was no question about it; Mycroft’s arch, clever voice was completely unmistakable. She had been the woman on the phone in Wanborough, who had called—dear God, months ago now. 

And Sherlock—Sherlock had known. 

Joan looked to Sherlock, opening her mouth, and Sherlock said, “I did warn you not to pay attention to her.”

Her voice sounded grey, sing-song. She had stopped trembling entirely, but her eyes fixed with a strange sharpness on Joan’s face—as if, for a moment, beseeching her to do something, though Joan didn’t know what. Then her gaze slipped away.

“I can’t stay for long, unfortunately,” Mycroft said, recalling Joan’s attention. Joan wondered how much she knew, and felt a little ill. Mycroft took an unhurried sip of her tea and set it down with a quiet sigh of enjoyment before continuing. “Work to do. No rest for the wicked.”

“Where is it that you work?” Joan asked, and heard her own voice brittle and sharp, remembering what Sherlock had said about government activities too boring to be anything but secret, or whatever she had dismissed them as.

Mycroft gave a genial, soft-edged smile which promised to go slowly for Joan’s benefit. “I occupy a minor position in the Foreign Office.”

“She _is_ the Foreign Office,” Sherlock intoned from behind the turned-up flap of her coat collar, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, a one-woman Greek chorus.

“Yes, _thank_ you, Sherlock,” Mycroft sighed, and raised her eyebrows at Joan. When Joan’s face remained stony, Mycroft just lifted her brows higher and took another sip of tea. “You two _do_ present a united front.”

Sherlock remained unresponsive, looking like she was contemplating a chess move for a game no one else could see. Joan put down her cup of tea and counted to ten. All that did was provide her with ten long seconds in which to think about all the excellent reasons she had to be furious.

“This is really cosy,” she said, turning to fix Mycroft hard with her stare, “but I’m not sure what you want, Miss Holmes.”

She expected Mycroft to sneer and smile and say something saccharine and aristocratic, but instead Mycroft’s eyes turned stern and bored and her voice hardened slightly. “To meet you face to face, Corporal,” she said, and then turned easily to Sherlock, rekindling her expression of long-suffering good taste without losing the slight edge in her tone. “And to offer my sister whatever aid she might require in—”

“None,” Sherlock said.

“—in carrying out the task with which she has been charged,” Mycroft finished with a heavy patience, and Sherlock snorted and started scrabbling through the pockets of her coat for another cigarette. 

“Sorry,” Joan started, and Mycroft managed to be dismissive as she explained:

“Solving the murder of Robert Walthamstow.”

Joan stared at her. “How do you know about,” she began, but Sherlock interrupted her by lighting her cigarette, gulping down smoke, and saying, “As I was just _saying_ to Mycroft, it’s all coming along swimmingly. Right, Joan?”

Joan stared at her, and back to Mycroft. Alright; Sherlock didn’t want her sister’s help, even though Mycroft apparently had access to the information Sherlock needed. _Robert_ Walthamstow? They hadn’t heard his first name before, or at least Joan hadn’t.

Both of them were looking at her. Joan had the unpleasant suspicion that whatever game they were playing involved using her as the board. “Yeah,” she said, unconvinced and unconvincing, but having deciding that if she had to pick a side, it would be Sherlock’s every time. “Really—swimmingly.”

“So, you see,” Sherlock said, huffing out a delicate cloud of smoke while Mycroft raised her eyebrows insistently at her, “I’m really fine. Lovely of you to offer, though. I think you’ve got to go, though, haven’t you, sister? Aren’t you having dinner with someone?”

Mycroft gave a sigh which seemed like the culmination of twenty five years of exasperation. “Sherlock,” she said, her tone sobering and growing tired, so that she finally sounded like she was speaking rather than reciting, “whatever you believe to be my motive in offering help—”

“Motive, singular?” Sherlock inquired. “That’s a little simplistic for you, surely. Don’t you usually have at least four on the go?”

“Sherlock.”

“There’s nothing to discuss,” Sherlock said, in an overcast afternoon of a voice, threatening rain with a sense of frigid inevitability. Joan looked between them, and thought back to what Sherlock had been gabbling in their room: _lessons learnt from 1939—never busy enough to stop her from meddling…_

Mycroft stood, and wrapped her fingers around the handle of an out-of-place umbrella, turning to go. “In that case,” she murmured, a faint regret in her tone. “Lovely to meet you, Corporal Watson.” Sherlock snorted loudly and obviously, smoke shooting from her nostrils.

“Yeah,” Joan said. “Pleasure.”

Every time Mycroft smiled, she seemed to find it more painful. She didn’t offer her hand, but reached for her neat leather bag with a well-taught elegance.

“As Sherlock says, I’m afraid I’m keeping a work-colleague waiting—”

A movement in the corner of Joan’s eye made her turn her gaze on Sherlock, and Joan saw that she had left her cigarette resting in the ashtray but had raised her fingers up by her mouth anyway. Her face was crumpled into a slack, froggy, peering expression. It was a moment before Joan realised that she was miming smoking a cigar behind her sister’s back. 

Joan managed to turn her horrified laugh into a choking gulp. Mycroft turned, and Sherlock immediately sniffed, uncreased her features and rubbed her lower lip entirely innocently, flashing a confused smile up at her, Churchill impression totally dissolved.

“And he does hate that,” Mycroft finished, after a long moment of staring dispassionately down at her younger sister, her voice dry and exasperated. “Sherlock, one more thing—”

“ _Please_ don’t feel obliged.”

“—I had a telephone call from a Major Andrew Harding of the Inter Services Research Bureau.” 

Joan, who had seized her tea in the hope that swallowing it would help her not to start giggling, put the cup down without drinking, her throat feeling tight. Sherlock pushed her hand along the table and reached slowly for her cigarette, staring fixedly at the ashtray. Mycroft, grey as a statue in Parliament Square, did nothing but cast a shadow and speak. “He’d like to see you in his office at number 83 Baker Street, at your earliest convenience today.” 

Neither of them responded. Mycroft hefted her umbrella, sighed, and delivered her parting shot almost mournfully. “Both of you, I gather. Good-bye, Sherlock; Corporal Watson.”

Her heels clicked on the way out, and then she was gone.

Joan sank back in her chair. “Oh shit,” she said. “ _Shit_.” Sherlock was huddled behind her cigarette, pulling on it as if it had done her some personal injury and wrapping herself tighter in her coat. Her mouth was turned downwards, her brow stormy. “Well,” Joan said. “By all standards, that went _swimmingly_ , too.”

“Shut up,” Sherlock murmured, quite absently, looking at nothing.

“Harding _knows_ , Sherlock—”

“Harding knows we went for a jaunt into the city on our own,” Sherlock said sharply, her eyes finally fixing on Joan. “Which could mean anything. Perhaps I was planning on calling in a few old Cambridge friends who now work in the civil service. Perhaps some of those RAF men on the train told us they were going dancing tonight, and we were planning to meet up with them. It’s not the end of the world. He’ll do most of the work through his own assumptions.”

Her voice was so cold that it was a moment before Joan realised she was trying to make her feel better. Probably. It wasn’t working, but the knowledge that Sherlock was trying to make it to work was somehow helpful. Slowly, Joan leant backwards, rubbing her hand through her hair. “Whatever he thinks, we are still,” she said, “in a hell of a lot of trouble.”

“Yes,” Sherlock rumbled through a cloud of smoke, her eyes distant. “One good thing, though.”

“Please, tell me.”

“Whoever murdered Robert Walthamstow is in more.” She straightened up, took a final pull on her cigarette, and deposited it in the ashtray, where it smoldered delicately. “Come on. I believe our orders said _earliest convenience_.”

“Right, right,” Joan said, getting to her feet, and hurrying after Sherlock, weaving through tables and trying not to trample on any handbags. “Sorry—sorry. Sherlock, what about paying—”

“Mycroft knows the proprietor,” Sherlock said smoothly, giving a man who had to be the aforementioned proprietor a quick, forced smile over Joan’s head. “Come along.”

“Right. Of course,” Joan muttered, hurrying out onto the street. “You have your family black market connections, and I have mine.”

“Ha.”

“Er, Sherlock, there was one thing—”

Sherlock stopped, turned to her. Joan swallowed. The street was more or less empty; they were in one of those dusty, dry areas of town which bustled with the ghost of life during the long hollow hours of the mid-afternoon. It was getting on for six, but the sky was still bright and clear, only seeming to compound the strange, skeletal sparseness which London had discovered since the war. “What?” Sherlock asked.

The question _did something happen in 1939?_ died on Joan’s lips. After all, Sherlock would only raise her eyebrows, and drawl, _yes, there were a few dramatic news events_ , or something like that. The war would cloud the air as it always did and Sherlock would use it willingly as a smoke screen.

So instead, Joan shoved her tongue around her dry mouth and opted for: “When you were stomping around getting dressed, did you put on any knickers?” 

Sherlock’s mouth curved upwards merrily, her eyes creasing.

“No,” she said, with succinct pride, and swung off again, trusting Joan to follow, leaving her thinking: _stupid, mad woman_ , a laugh tumbling out of her mouth in spite of everything.

* * *

Joan’s interview, months ago now, had taken place on Baker Street but not in number 83, which led her to vaguely suspect that the organisation Harding worked for (which she couldn’t really believe was called the Inter Services Research Bureau) had infiltrated the whole street, stretching out clandestine fingers and growing like fungus. It was a paranoia which she quickly dismissed.

Strange, though, that they were escorted into the mansion-block building, and up two flights of stairs, by a uniformed sergeant who was obviously armed.

The door they were told to wait outside didn’t have a name on it, but rather the significantly mysterious letter-phrase ‘F/DD’ on a typed piece of paper behind plastic. They waited on hard green seats in an anteroom, where a secretary with peachy blonde hair and a habit of snuffling unhappily at her typing hunched her shoulders and clacked away at some endless document, occasionally casting Sherlock and Joan suspicious looks. Her desk set-up looked makeshift, one of the legs of her chair supported by a thick, unmarked book. Joan wondered if Harding had turfed her out of what had once been a shared office, or perhaps stolen her from elsewhere.

The door creaked open. Joan’s idle, distracted thoughts vanished like bathwater gurgling down a drain, replaced with a cold blast of nervousness. 

Harding leaned out, as red and rakish as ever, but now with a hard brusqueness to the set of his square jaw. His lips twitched downwards as he saw them. Joan stiffened, ready to wish Sherlock good luck through a quick moment of eye contact.

But: “Watson,” he said, and jerked his head towards the interior of his office.

Joan didn’t swallow, and didn’t ask herself why she was suddenly, mercifully glad to be taking the first verbal barrage. Just said, “Sir,” and pushed her shoulders back, following him inside.

His office was nothing like the one he had cultivated at Wanborough, and Joan wondered, with all the sudden shock of missing a step on a staircase, if the disorganisation there had been _apt cover_. This room wasn’t neat, but it was harshly compartmentalised, with a wall almost obscured by shelved, unlabeled files in blocks of different colours. On the desk was one of the green-receiver telephones which seemed endemic to the Inter Services Research Bureau and its many associates. It had no dial; just three buttons, quite unapologetically marked SECRET, NORMAL and ENGAGE FOR SECRET. Where the dial should have been was a circular sticker of paper, exhorting the reader to _pick up receiver for exchange_ and, surely somewhat contradictorily, to remember that _conversations on telephone were not private_.

Finally, Joan dared look away from it, and up to Harding.

He was looking at her with a dull, solid anger, his eyes like green Bakelite. Disappointment didn’t seem to crumple him further, but rather hardened his edges. Her stomach swooped downwards, and she almost felt pushed to try and explain herself, but set her jaw and refused. It was, after all, what he wanted her to do.

With a sigh, he sat, not inviting her to do the same.

“I try, Watson,” was the first thing out of his mouth. “I really bloody try.”

Joan didn’t reply, so Harding kicked back, surveying her from his chair and rubbing a hand over the tight white line of his mouth. Joan waited. She waited until the point where she was desperate for him to shout at her.

“What do you think you’re _here_ for?” he asked instead, not raising his voice. His voice was harsh, incredulous, his hand dropping away from his mouth in a loose, angry gesture of giving up. A thick, hot guilt was churning in Joan’s stomach, trying to creep up her throat. She swallowed it down, set her teeth, and savagely willed him to lose his temper so that she could have the pleasure, at least, of feeling totally and completely sick of herself.

Harding hissed in his breath through his teeth, rubbed his hand over his mouth again. “Jesus. Jesus!” Joan tensed for the onslaught of shouting, but he grappled with his self-control, and visibly pushed his temper back. Took a breath. Carried on. “I am trying, Watson, to train you for a very serious job, and I promise you, in the course of that, I give you a _hell_ of a lot of freedom.” He shook his head. And finally the angry impulse which kept flashing irregularly up and down in his voice started to just build and build.

“Sleeping out? Fine. Bit mouthy with your superiors? Bloody good, that’s the mark of a proper irregular, as well as having a bit of cop-on when it comes to when not to do it. Total weasel? Brilliant, we could always do with a couple more of those. You might have noticed that we are _not_ , and you will _damn_ well excuse my language, a pile of _fucking_ amateurs, Watson!”

The silence rang. Joan fixed her eyes on a particular anonymous file on the shelves behind Harding and kept her mouth shut tight.

It took him a few moments to settle back down into an even rhythm of breathing. He scrunched his mouth up, straightened it out, took a long hard sniff. Rubbed his hand over the lower part of his face again and again, then slumped back, and fixed her with a look that was almost disgusted. “We don’t care,” he said, his voice calm and hard. “ _I_ don’t care. Trust me, we employ some lunatics. Drug addicts, actors, nancies, women. I hear they’ve got an infestation of poets spreading disease down in the coding section. All we want are people who can do their damn job. But what good are you to me if I don’t know where you are? Tell me that.” He leant back, drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair, and raised his eyebrows. “You can answer that one. And look at me while you do it.”

Answer it how, Joan wondered? Pour out her apologies, flagellate herself, tell him savagely that no one, _no one_ , could find her bad decisions as frustrating as she did—? She swallowed to clear her throat. Then she lowered her gaze and stared as calmly as she could into his hard-boned, Celtic face. 

Damn it.

“Sir,” she said, in tones of deep stupidity, and Harding slammed his fist down on his desk with an ugly thud that reverberated through the room, making the papers on it bounce, and a sharp sting of angry regret— _why did I say that_ —go through Joan from top to toe.

“This,” Harding growled, with sudden hot fury, “is exactly the problem I have with you,” and the words were almost Harry’s, really, even the accent was almost there, “ _this_ —that you’re bloody good, and once you’re in the field, you’re going to be gold. You realise why you’re in here and not Holmes, don’t you? It’s because Holmes thinks this is a game, and I don’t want to waste my precious time beating the dead horse that is her ego. You, though—you really do know better. You want to run off and get your jollies with her and her set for a weekend? Fine. I don’t care as long as you come back in one piece. But you ask _me_. You tell _me_ where the hell you are.”

Harding let this pronouncement hang in the air, slowly diffusing, and uncurled his fist, very slowly. Joan closed her eyes, but could feel him surveying her; knew he was leaning back, gradually, easing himself into a position of repose which didn’t come naturally. Joan felt like she was drowning somewhere inside herself, while her outer shell stayed stiff and cold. _Open your eyes_ , she harangued herself, _open your eyes you stupid cow you’re behaving like a bloody idiot_ , and she did. Just in time to watch Harding lick his lips and shake his head.

He was crumpled again, without being warm exactly. He looked tired, taken out of himself by his brief transport of anger. “You’ll have noticed,” he said, “the letters on my door. They stand for F Section, Deputy Director. So why the hell am I involved in the basic training of agents, you might well ask? Because I’m not a bloody desk-jobber; I’ve been involved in irregular warfare all my years of service, and unlike everyone directly above me I don’t believe you learn much from paperwork, but I do believe that knowledge is power. Where I’m going with this, Watson, is that _I know_.”

All Joan could do was breathe. Just breathe. There was nothing in the world she could put up in her defence. Harding was still talking, his voice worn-out and lacking venom. “You might think you’ve got secrets that are going to compromise you, but you don’t. I know them all already. I know about your spiv brother, I know about your would-be medical career, and how you ran off to drink and dance in Belle Paris, and how you faked your injury to get off driving—”

“ _What_ ,” Joan said, snapping back to reality, her nails suddenly digging into her palms.

Harding smiled ruefully; Joan’s stomach lurched. Her breath was gone. By objecting to one item on the list she had admitted the others were true. Her mouth tasted coppery; her thoughts felt thick, slow, rolling in and out like waves.

“Sorry, Watson,” Harding said, sighing. “I said you were going to be gold, not that you already are. Sit.”

“Sir—” Panicked.

“Just sit, Watson.”

She just sat. The seat she took was one of two chairs positioned in front of Harding’s desk. Harding looked at her for a few seconds, and then rubbed his hand through his hair and muttered, apparently to himself, “Alright.” Then he leaned forward, lacing his own hands and putting them on the table.

“So,” he said. “Bollocking over. I enjoyed it...” He clasped his hands tighter, raised them off the desk for a moment, then sighed oddly and set them back down. “Mm. Thing is. I don’t really care, Watson, about your past pursuits, or those of your family. And I don’t think you should let me care about them, see what I mean? In other words, no pleading, no whinging, no nothing. This conversation never happened and if you’re aiding and abetting a black market dealer by not reporting him, for instance, then what I don’t know won’t hurt me. Understood? Good. Now. We’re going to talk about something more interesting— _by which I mean_ , I will let you talk _later_.”

Joan had opened her mouth, but closed it at this, to which Harding gave a firm, approving nod. “Right you are. Now. I assume Holmes has told you all about the minor problem we’re having—the problem we’ve asked her to look at.”

Joan’s shoulders stiffened as she searched desperately for a way to deny it which wouldn’t sound suspiciously over-innocent, or awkwardly confirm that she knew what Harding was talking about—but Harding was waving a hand, showing a humourless slice of tobacco-yellow teeth. “It’s fine. In the jargon, sometimes an agent has to be made conscious.”

“What,” she snapped, slightly surprised to hear herself speak; not meaning the word to be so flat or so sharp, like the crunch of bone.

“She’s running you as her agent,” said Harding, standing up with a sigh. Joan grabbed anxiously at the arms of her chair, bracing herself to stand and be dismissed, an immediate physical reaction which broke through her alarmed bewilderment. “No, stay there. Getting you to do some of her work, feeding it back to her, orchestrating what you know and what you don’t know. Probably without knowing it, which just goes to show she’s a natural, unfortunately. A conscious agent knows the bigger picture. An unconscious agent is conveniently oblivious. Best way I’ve heard it put, actually, is that a conscious agent knows he’s working for you, and an unconscious agent thinks he’s working for himself.”

He was moving across the room, saying all of this with an inconceivable casualness. While Joan was still struck dumb with the sheer force of the anger slowly grinding and gaining momentum within her, Harding cracked open the door and said, “Holmes, get in here.”

Which was stupid, which was _too much_ , and _too soon_ , but before Joan could even understand the sheer scope of her own anger Sherlock came gliding in like a cloud passing over the sun. She didn’t look at Harding as he held the door open for her, but instead met Joan’s eye and walked straight towards her. She took the seat beside her without waiting to be asked, and reclined there, staring forwards.

The proximity, after everything, was a terrible thing to be aware of.

 _She’s running you as her agent_. Joan swallowed hard, gulped down cold, clear air, told herself to think; to breathe; to not say anything. It wasn’t, after all, like Harding knew anything about the relationship between her and Sherlock. Not really.

Harding sat down, and with a shock that went straight through her, Joan felt Sherlock’s knee knock against hers. Invisible to Harding, of course. Hidden behind the desk. She must have twitched, jumped, made some tiny movement perceptible only to Sherlock through disturbances in the atmosphere (it felt like that, suddenly; it felt like Sherlock was tuned to Joan’s frequency, listening hard) because Sherlock quickly pulled her knees in. Her gaze drifted curiously to Joan, then away again.

Joan kept looking forwards. To think. To breathe. To not say anything.

Harding was settling, limbs spread lazily wide like he was preparing for a mid-afternoon snooze. “So,” he said, “Holmes. I gather you’ve been investigating. Learn anything?”

It was in the third second of silence that Joan finally dared turn to search for Sherlock in her peripheral vision.

Sherlock had her hands steepled, her fingertips against her mouth, and her eyes were trained on something only she was aware of. Joan’s heart sank, and she willed her to speak, to do something, suddenly feeling that if she didn’t, it would be—out of pure stubbornness—another of her grand, sweeping bonfires of bloody-minded self-destruction, carried out so that no one else would beat her to her own weak spots.

“In that case,” Harding started, and Sherlock said, “Sinnerman.”

Joan took a breath for what felt like the first time in years. Harding leaned back, and said what Joan abruptly decided were her two favourite words in the English language: “Go on.”

She watched Sherlock fearlessly now, having an excuse, knowing that whatever Sherlock was about to say would provide a reason for anyone stare at her; and knowing, too, that they were beyond the danger zone, that Sherlock wasn’t going to dash herself against the rocks. Her pink, full lips were slightly parted, and she was silent again, but it was a thoughtful, considered silence, one she was visibly measuring. Her lashes beat once, twice, against her cheeks, and she dropped her hands.

“Operation Sinnerman,” she said, clearly and quietly, “is _not_ an attempt to discover the identity of the person responsible for the death of Robert Walthamstow, a British saboteur, on the second of January 1942. It _is_ an attempt to establish the facts regarding the _other_ events of the second of January; namely, an explosion caused by people affiliated with this organisation, the...Inter Services Research Bureau—” Sherlock’s upper lip hitched up delicately and pleasantly for a moment, her smile sardonic “—all of whom were something to do with ‘Professor’. Whether ‘Professor’ is a term for a person, a group of people or a certain operation, I don’t know.”

Harding was watching; Joan was just conscious of him in the corner of his eye. He looked tense, fascinated. Joan didn’t think he could be more tense or more fascinated than she was.

He made a move, opened his mouth—blurry in Joan’s peripheral vision—but Sherlock carried on abruptly, giving him no time to speak:

“The explosion itself was probably an attack on a train because a moving target like that might explain why Walthamstow came to be caught in the blast,” she said, “and most crucially, why no one could establish until, oh, April at the earliest, June at the latest, that that was how he died; because where he was seen last may not have been where he died. I mean, either that or it was blind incompetence. And, admittedly, the difficulty in getting information in and out of France— _don’t_ be insulted.” 

She dropped a long white hand carelessly into her own lap, the other curling against her cheek, and Joan thrilled to the sound of her voice even while mentally racing to try and keep up. She was checking what Sherlock was saying off the facts she knew. Sherlock had made leaps, Joan realised, that Joan hadn’t even come close to. They sounded almost dangerous. And she wasn’t stopping.

“So that’s the reason why Captain Carter’s allowed to even hear the words _Operation Sinnerman_ —because he was closely involved in the training of the agents involved.” She had picked up the right language somewhere, or the jargon, as Harding had called it; either that, or she was making it up as she went along, and trusting to confidence to make it sound convincing. Whatever the reason, it came tumbling easily off her tongue. It sounded good. 

“Look at you.” She moved her hand from her face, flicked her fingers lazily at Harding, raised an eyebrow. “You’ve pulled in an outsider to investigate, put me through training specially. I’m isolated from the rest of this organisation, and I’m willing to bet you haven’t told many of your upper-level colleagues anything about the job you’ve given me. You’re trying to keep the fact that you suspect the explosion resulted in the death of one of your agents very, very quiet and very much under your control.”

Harding’s face was unreadable; not softened, but slackened. He was very still. He nodded, just once, but Joan doubted Sherlock was stopping for the sake of getting permission to carry on. More for drama, if anything. She saw a flash of a smile steal across Sherlock’s mouth, stretching her lips thinner.

“I’m unsure,” she admitted, “of _quite_ what caused the explosion on the 2nd of January to be controversial, but from your need to access the records of how agents associated with Professor took to demolition-training, I assume you want to establish whether any of them had a hand in it. I’m also unsure why you think Walthamstow died in it, but it’s the hypothesis you’re working on right now so I’m building my own around it, though if you’d like to hear the other theories, I assure you I have them.”

“Save them,” Harding said, this time talking over her; “they’re wrong.”

Sherlock paused to digest that, and then gave an almost imperceptible nod, and carried on. “Working, then, on the assumption that Walthamstow was blown up on the second of January, then obviously someone was impersonating him over the airwaves to get you to send rescue missions to a man who was already dead. He might have sent the first distress call setting up a meeting, but he certainly didn’t send the others. 

“How am I doing?”

She wasn’t smiling. Just looking like she’d just made her first kill. Satisfaction hummed in the air around her. Harding looked at her closely for a few seconds, then got to his feet, taking a file off the shelf behind him with stretching, unhurried movements. Joan watched his back as he reached for it. Slowly, he began to talk.

“Inter Services Research Bureau. Always forget that some people think we’re really called that. We’re not. Might as well tell you this now, you’re going to get the speech with all the rest of the students on Monday anyway. Try to look surprised when you hear it. We’re the Special Operations Executive. SOE. _Professor_ is a network of agents and their native recruits currently situated in Occupied France, named for the callsign of their organiser. Operation Sinnerman,” he said, “as you rightly say, refers to a concerted effort to identify the person responsible and the reasons for blowing up a freight train carrying coal from Denain down through Picardy and Champagne-Ardenne. It’s an in-house investigation, you might say.” 

He turned, putting a file down on the desk and sitting down again with a heavy thud. He put his elbows on the desktop and looked seriously between them.

“Reached any conclusions yet?” Sherlock inquired.

Harding sniffed, shrugged, rubbed his moustache with a forefinger. “Might have been one of our agents. Or it might have been one of our agents’ agents, the people they recruit once they’re over there in France. Resistance sorts, sometimes even Communists, whoever’ll get the job done.” 

_France_ —it was the first time the word had been given any official weight. Joan sat up straighter, and Harding sighed, transferring his gaze to her and raising his eyebrows. She swallowed.

“Yes, Watson,” he said. “France. We’ll have you sign the farce that is the Official Secrets Act in a second, but don’t bother acting too surprised; I might as well tell you that everyone clever enough to make it through training figures out that they’re headed to occupied or as-good-as-occupied territory during preliminary training.”

“She got it on the first day,” Sherlock murmured, her voice reserved and muted. She sounded curiously defiant, and Joan turned to her quickly, ready to say _actually_ , but Sherlock’s eyes were fixed on Harding, and she didn’t look moveable at all. 

There was something both encouraging and alarming about that level of stubborn belief putting its shoulder behind Joan’s cause and _shoving_. Joan returned her gaze to Harding.

“And well done to Watson,” Harding said, raising his eyebrows at her. She’s running you as her agent, he had said... “So, I’m sure you’re wondering why, exactly, we don’t know which of our boys blew up the train. Pretty piss-poor organisation, right? You aren’t wrong. In general, see, we try to get our agents to adhere to a general rule which goes something like ‘no bangs without Foreign Office approval’, but in this case, there was no approval whatsoever. Not from the Foreign Office, not from Selborne, who has responsibility for us in Cabinet— certainly not from Baker Street.”

He spread his hands, giving them a moment to absorb the information. Joan’s brow wrinkled, and so did Sherlock’s, but unlike Sherlock she didn’t open her mouth.

“Hardly seems,” Sherlock began, but Joan shook her head, and it made the words die on Sherlock’s lips, her frown intensifying.

Harding was looking at Joan, and when she caught his eyes, he nodded. Sherlock had been going to suggest that it _hardly seemed_ the sort of thing which could happen in a well-organised military endeavour overseas, but the fact was that she just wasn’t—well, she wasn’t very military, and she didn’t quite understand.

“RAF, eh,” Harding said, leaving Sherlock to prickle, and Joan to try and find a facial expression which expressed amusement with her commanding officer and sympathy for her friend. A second later, though, it was irrelevant, because Harding was carrying on, talking shop again.

“The explosion was completely unexpected from our end, is what I’m trying to say. We have messages from members of Professor, all stating different things, unable to understand our requests, mucking up their coding—all the usual chaos of trying to run a clandestine operation with radio as our only link and a complicated encryption process to go through either end. I tell you, a good wireless operator in France is priceless. Unfortunately, in France, they’ve got a life expectancy of six weeks, and even the brilliant ones have to transmit while Gestapo DF vans circle like bloody sharks ready to pick up on their signals. It shows. But in general, it seems our boys were aware of plans to target the train, and that they supplied their French Resistance _amis_ with the means to do so, but weren’t expecting them to strike when they did.”

“But you aren’t sure that’s true,” Sherlock cut in, and Harding held up a hand. It was a gesture so gentle and so conclusive that even Sherlock fell silent.

In his own time, he lowered it.

“We’re talking,” he said, “about Sinnerman. Remember that. Which, as an investigation, is nothing to do with the death of an agent. It’s to do with trying to work out why a freight train was blown up with no one’s permission. Clear?” Sherlock raised her chin in a quiver of a nod. “Good. So, the thing is, Sinnerman is a damn joke.”

Sherlock blinked, and her face flickered, uncertain as a candle flame. Harding gave her an amused look and carried on.

“For one thing, if we so much as suspect it was the French, we’re in the all-clear,” he explained with a shrug. “They’re a resistance movement; who expects them to seek approval from the Brits? Yeah, our agents might have helped, but how were they to know the exact plans? Can’t set Europe ablaze without a little bit of uncontrolled wildfire. Confusion is our business, nature of irregular warfare, etcetera, all the stuff Churchill loves. We’re off the hook there, no matter how much the Foreign Office stamps its foot. For another thing, blowing up the train was a brilliant bit of sabotage. It’s pretty easy to excuse a victory, right? Tonnes of coal lost, train damaged beyond repair, all crew killed, morale lowered, and most importantly, rail service seriously disrupted. Beautiful; textbook.”

He leant back; spread his hands; seemed to ask, _what’s wrong with this picture?_

Sherlock said, “Sinnerman is cover.”

Harding smiled. “Yeah. Course it is. Everything I’ve told you has been completely true, and if we find out what happened with the train we’re half way to finding out what happened to our agent, but Sinnerman itself is alive for no reason other than it gives me a convenient excuse to ask inconvenient questions.”

“Tell me about Walthamstow.”

“Alright,” said Harding, shrugging, completely calm in the face of Sherlock’s honed stare. “For one thing, he’s not.”

“Not...?”

“Walthamstow. That was the name his dear old dad passed on to him, but for our purposes he had a couple of different ones. His French cover was Anton Durant, his callsign was Detective and his codename was Corentin. He was a fantastic organiser, had a beautiful mind for it. Grew up in France, man of the people, beloved of damn near everybody who clapped eyes on him.”

Sherlock left a skilful moment of silence before she supplied, helpfully, “And thoroughly dead.” Her bright tone was almost too much for Joan’s fraught nerves, which were always prone to making her laugh when no other recourse presented itself. Joan marshaled herself, though, and barring a slight, unavoidable twitch of her lips, remained completely steady, but Harding caught it:

“Yes,” he said, raising his voice, turning cool and serious. “Thoroughly dead, and if you think that’s funny, Watson, then I’d love to hear your opinion on the subject when you’re in France doing his job.”

Joan hadn’t thought it was funny; she had thought Sherlock was funny, and had been moved to laughter in the first place via anger and tension and nerves—and the nagging feeling that this _couldn’t_ be real. She steeled herself, and said, “No sir, sorry sir.” Sherlock gave her a sharp look, then sniffed.

Harding reached for the file on his desk and unfolded it. He was still moving with gentle, heart-stopping precision, silencing the whole room with the force of his calm. From the depths of the file he produced a sheet of greyish, translucent paper, and put it down in front of them. “The plain text of Corentin’s messages to us asking to arrange a flight back to Britain. The messages claiming to originate from Corentin, at least.”

Joan craned her neck to see, and beside her Sherlock bent elegantly downwards, a curl dislodging itself from behind her ear and tumbling down across her face. “Plain text?” Joan asked.

“Not in code,” Harding explained.

“No good to me,” Sherlock sighed after a second’s examination, slumping back in her chair and giving an exhausted, shooing flick of her fingers. It was a spoilt, malingering movement, full of the implication that the world was conspiring to needlessly tire her out.

“Beg your pardon?” said Harding, with restrained disbelief; and, “ _What_?” said Joan, with no restraint whatever, scrunching up her face and staring at Sherlock.

“ _Plain text_ ,” Sherlock said impatiently. “It’s not how he wrote them originally. I’ll need the copies of the original, encrypted messages, as well as details of coding conventions. Furthermore, he didn’t send these messages himself, did he? You didn’t say he was a wireless operator.”

“He encoded his messages and passed them onto a W/T to be transmitted. Different operator each time. The first one, at least, he knew personally, and he handed the message over face to face, which is bloody awful security but at least assures us that he _was_ responsible for the first transmission. Thing is, no one else knew his code. Each agent uses a separate one. These were all encoded perfectly in Corentin’s personal code, using all his security checks.”

“Even after his apparent death.”

“He’s definitely dead.”

“You’ve yet to explain why you think that.”

Joan returned her stare to the flimsy piece of paper on Harding’s desk, still caught on the fact that Sherlock was just ignoring it. It didn’t look _no good_. There were four messages in total, all short, all labeled with a date, growing more and more terse as they went on: 

> 14/12/1940  
>  MUCH TO TELL. TROUBLE WITH WIFE. SUGGEST MEETING AT PARLIAMENT SQUARE, GO ON TO GREEN DOOR. THAT’S ALL FOR NOW.
> 
> 20/01/1941  
>  WIFE UNFORTUNATELY STUBBORN SO UNABLE TO MAKE LAST ARRANGEMENT. EAGER TO SEE GREEN DOOR NONETHELESS. HYDE PARK CORNER. SEE YOU SOON.
> 
> 18/02/1941  
>  APOLOGIES FOR REPEATED MARITAL DISTURBANCES. RENDEZ-VOUS AT ST PAUL’S TO GO YOU KNOW WHERE. MESSAGE ENDS.
> 
> 12/03/1941  
>  TRAFALGAR SQUARE. MESSAGE ENDS.

“Green door?” she asked, looking up.

“The boys like to go to a certain pub across the road with a green door. The Farmhand and Fox. Seeing the green door means returning to England,” Harding sighed. “‘The wife’ is Corentin’s cover. He’s afraid it’s close to being blown, or blown already, and it’s getting in the way of him getting to where he needs to be.”

“Provided he actually sent any of these messages. Do many agents use that shorthand?” Sherlock inquired.

“Wife, green door...yeah, a few. More slang than code at this point. The London locations, though, are codenames for possible landing spots in France knocked up personally between me and him. Organising drop-offs and pick-ups was what he did best, and he used that code to communicate with us. ‘Much to tell’ isn’t strictly speaking code, but it might as well be. The implication is that he doesn’t think he can tell it via wireless transmission.”

“Thinks his codes are broken?” Sherlock’s voice was lazy, and Joan wondered why they were using present tense. She was looking between Harding and Sherlock like they were participants in a tennis match.

“Almost definitely.”

“These landing sites he referred to using London locations—they weren’t common spots?”

“No. Brand new. We gave him a list of potential sites, practically labeled the whole of France using places in London. Had to dip into Liverpool occasionally. He travelled, used his connections, worked out which sites would work for us.”

“Had he ever mentioned these locations—Parliament Square, Hyde Park Corner, St Paul’s, Trafalgar Square—as possible landing spots before?”

Harding paused for a moment, blinked. “No.”

“Was there any pattern in the assignation of London names to possible landing sites?”

“None. All random.”

Sherlock settled back with her hands steepled again, staring at Harding over them. “You still haven’t told me,” she said, “why you think he died in the freight train sabotage. Was he involved in setting up the explosion?”

“Corentin? God, no. Charming, a devil with a rifle, but not someone you want mucking around with explosives. Never took to them.”

“Why, then?”

“Dates match up,” Harding said, with a shrug which Joan suddenly suspected. It, and his insistently opaque tone of voice, seemed almost intentionally blockheaded—like an officer’s version of her own litany of ‘sir’s. “Last seen in Picardy, around where the train stopped to take on some extra cargo and where it was later sabotaged. One of the carriages and a decent section of the track were blown to pieces, and the fire took care of the rest.”

“ _And_.”

Harding stared at a point on his desk, shutters behind his eyes and his lips slightly parted, as if he were constantly on the verge of speech. It was a few seconds before he spoke, and when he did, his voice had that soft, invincible certainty which demanded that the ear bend and listen, however unwillingly.

“ _And_ this April,” he said, “the Professor network lost another agent, if not without something of a struggle. Codename Alain. Now, he _was_ a W/T, and a good one. Captured, escaped, uncached a wireless set and set about asking us for a flight home, as well as stating that during his period of captivity, he was questioned repeatedly about the freight train, with most of the questions focusing on the role of _the man inside the train_. Unfortunately, German direction-finding vans picked him up immediately. And he didn’t escape a second time.”

Sherlock inhaled slowly, noisily, leaning back as she did so, her chin raising and her whole body seeming to somehow change as she moved; her shoulders falling back, her eyes widening and glinting. “They found an extra body.”

“They certainly did. The train was meant to be crewed by four men, and they found the bodies of five.”

The way Sherlock’s head tipped back, pulling taut the column of her neck, made Joan have to look away quickly, reminding herself: think—breathe—don’t say anything. She counted the seconds. One, two. Think. Breathe. _Don’t—_. Three. It was a longer silence, this one, than the one Sherlock had pushed forwards after Harding had asked her what she knew. Four, five.

Sherlock cracked her neck with a pop of bone. “Very well,” she said, her hair sweeping her shoulders and settling around her face with a bounce of curls as she rolled her head around and fixed Harding in her sights. “As I said, I’ll need the original, encrypted messages, and a chat with a cryptologist who isn’t an idiot. I also require the transcripts where Alain discusses his interrogation, plain text and encrypted. After that, I want the personnel files of every agent, past or present, deceased or alive, who is or ever was part of the Professor network—”

“ _Ha_ ,” said Harding, leaning hard on the syllable and not laughing at all.

“Problem?” Sherlock inquired.

“You’re not getting the personal details of active agents, Holmes.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Sherlock murmured, glancing off to one side with a roll of her eyes as if trying half-heartedly to hide her disdain and only making it more obvious. Harding straightened, seemed to suddenly occupy more space than he had done a moment ago.

“You think that I’m going to toss you information which could conceivably get agents killed? My agents?”

“Major Harding, I really—”

Harding raised his voice; it blared, hard and calm, his eyes flashing. “ _Quiet_.” 

Sherlock closed her mouth. Slowly. 

“In a few weeks,” Harding said, “you’re going to learn how to stand an interrogation. But there’s nothing which can really, genuinely resist torture except ignorance. If I give you that information, then there’s a chance that it’ll become German property at some stage. This isn’t a matter of me not liking you and you not liking me, it’s just basic security. And when you’re in the field, I will afford you the same basic security I promise to all the agents out in France trusting me with their lives. Do you understand, Holmes?”

Sherlock looked slightly affronted by the heat in Harding’s voice, her eyelashes fanning. It was, Joan realised, something she seemed to have copied from her sister; an attempt to make people feel dirty for expressing emotion. Mycroft was better at it. Sherlock just looked like she had been snapped at by a waiter, and seemed to know it, because she pushed the expression away and resettled her features quickly. Opened her mouth. Joan thought _oh God_ and hoped she’d be careful.

“Sir,” Sherlock said, quite blankly. Joan could have slumped sideways in her chair, not exactly feeling proud or pleased but certainly feeling _something_. And Harding looked up to heaven for strength, eyes rolling.

“Get out of my sight, both of you. Miss Harman out there will escort you down to sign off on the Official Secrets Act. Leave the number of that hotel with her and we’ll see about the rest of your requests, Holmes. Don’t think this is a lending library.”

Joan couldn’t get up fast enough, shooting off a, “Thank you, sir,” and preparing to haul Sherlock to her feet by the collar of her unseasonable greatcoat if she didn’t stand up in a timely fashion. Fortunately, Sherlock stood, gripping her coat with both hands and giving it a tug to straighten it out, tossing her curls.

“Yes,” she said. “Thanks. Incidentally, that W/T Corentin knew personally. What happened to him?”

Harding raised his eyebrows and leaned back slightly. “Her, Holmes,” he said. “She’s home. Domestic duty. Not recommended for any future fieldwork, but not really suitable for release into the wild.”

“Oh?”

“She was debriefed when she got home. Nothing. You won’t get anything out of her.”

“I _love_ it when people say that about witnesses,” said Sherlock. “I’ll need a name and an address.”

Joan watched her from the doorway, as Sherlock loomed over Harding’s desk with a triumphant smirk wrenching her full, lush mouth sideways, and her weight elegantly on one hip, one of her feet flat on the ground and one of them angled up, poised on the toe. Harding narrowed his eyes up at her, his expression not quite able to deny that he was impressed—without ever coming close to liking her.

 _She’s running you as her agent_.

She wasn’t, Joan thought. Whatever she was doing—and she _was_ doing something to Joan, even if she didn’t mean to, making her unfold and unravel and begin, unsteadily and almost unwillingly, to feel new—whatever it was, it wasn’t that. 

It wasn’t fear or insecurity which had pulled the safety pin on her temper, made it start to tick. What had made her angry was different, difficult to explain—a sour, churning sense of things being unjust. Was that it? One moment it had crashed down upon her and the next it had deserted her completely, leaving her just stunned. All because of the thought that, no matter what, Harding thought of her that way now and always would; in relation to the figure of Sherlock Holmes, Joan wasn’t the lover,wasn’t even the friend, but the conscious agent. There was something uneasy, cold, about the idea of learning to define the world around them through the jargon of networks, agents, conscious and unconscious—there was something worse about the sickening crunch of realisation that came with the thought, _what were you doing to Harry, then, if not judging how far he could be ‘made conscious’?_

“Edith Whistler, her name was,” Harding was saying, jerking Joan swiftly out of her own thoughts. “By all means take a trip down to Grendon Underwood if you want to waste your Sunday.”

Sherlock was smirking. Joan caught it, steeled herself, and scrapped tomorrow’s plans.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Chapter 13 will be here on Monday 23rd September. And here's a whole barrage of notes for you, in case that chapter wasn't information overload enough.
> 
>  **"the Phoney War"** \- This is the term given to the period between the declaration of war in September 1939 and the Battle of France in 1940, characterised by a lack of movement against the German Reich by the United Kingdom and France. (Also called 'the Bore War' and 'the Sitzkrieg'. Historical puns, getchoor historical puns here.)
> 
>  **"infiltrated the whole street"** \- More or less exactly what SOE did. Eventually, they more or less occupied the whole of one end of Baker Street. They were space-scavengers, and in their early years had to try and get in chummy with Marks  & Spencer's, who owned a couple of warehouses in the district which they urgently needed. (That sort of making-do-and-mending was really common in SOE, and is also what inspired Harding's possibly-pinched secretary).
> 
>  **"the significantly mysterious letter-phrase ‘F/DD’"** \- SOE's security protocols demanded that officer-class personnel working in Baker Street (eg, not agents), were all referred to by these letter-phrases on official documentation. ...After struggling to work out what the actual letter-phrase for the Deputy Director of F Section would be, I just went with something obvious.
> 
>  **"the green-receiver telephones"** \- SCRAMBLER TELEPHONES! Have I put these in a note before? I just love 'em. Here's a [visual reference](http://www.britishtelephones.com/gpo/pictures/t394scrambler.jpg).
> 
>  **"Drug addicts, actors, nancies, women. I hear they’ve got an infestation of poets spreading disease down in the coding section."** \- All true. This comes up time and time again in the literature on SOE; they employed anyone as agents, and they were looked-down-upon by MI6 for it. The poets seem to be particularly notorious, which I love; the codes SOE used rested on poetry, with each agent having their own poem with which they were taught to generate codes. This was insecure in a lot of ways, but was _really_ insecure if they used a well-known piece of verse. To combat this the coding section wrote their own poetry, and in a couple of cases called up the heads of country sections to say, "Hey, can you write us some poems?" ...with mixed results.
> 
>  **"the farce that is the Official Secrets Act"** \- During a bit of cursory research I discovered what I should probably have figured out from the name: the Official Secrets Act is a law, not a contract. 'Signing it' is a matter of signing a declaration that you're aware of the law; you can still be in breach of it even if you've never signed anything, and the act of 'signing the Official Secrets Act' is more of a scare tactic than a legal requirement. The more you know!
> 
>  **"Selborne"** \- Lord Selborne, who was Minister for Economic Warfare at the time, had Cabinet responsibility for SOE. (The Foreign Secretary, meanwhile, was—and is—the Cabinet champion of MI6).
> 
>  **"that's all for now"** \- It seems a strange and informal phrasing, but it's exactly the kind of thing SOE W/Ts were encouraged to do, because German codebreakers would be looking for phrases like 'message ends'.
> 
>  **"the green door"** \- The 'green door' referred to a real pub on Baker Street and 'seeing the green door' was real slang for returning to Britain amongst SOE operatives. Made up the stuff about the 'wife', though.
> 
> ...phew.


	13. Edith Whistler.

**SHERRINFORD HOUSE  
** **SURREY**  
 **MAY 1939**

Sherlock grasped her teacup by the bowl with her cigarette perched between the fingers of the same hand, a mannerism purposefully copied from East End housewives with hairnets and moustaches, and wrenched the handle of the door to Mycroft’s study as noisily as she could while she pushed it open.

“I’m going for a walk,” she announced.

Mycroft lifted her pen nib so as not to leave a blot on whatever delicately-phrased missive she was composing, and gave no other sign that she had even realised Sherlock was there. For Mycroft, of course, this was equal to a scream of annoyance, and Sherlock’s lip twitched.

Mycroft was at the report-writing stage of her career, spending liberal amounts of time in the office but always more at home, penning delicately-worded suggestions on how to improve efficiency at the higher levels of government. Mycroft somehow had a great abundance of time no matter what she did, all of it ticking steadily onwards; quite unlike Sherlock, who chased seconds and lolled for hours. 

The moment was coming—it was entirely inevitable—when Mycroft would be called up into some Whitehall office, and politely asked if she had ever considered a position with slightly more responsibility, being as she was a St Hilda’s woman with a sterling reputation and a gentle, skilful touch when it came to information. They could do with more ladies like her—keep things organised if the worst came to the worst— _she_ understood the present situation, of course. She’d be helping out a sort of governmental clearing-house, collating data, coming up with patterns, drawing together the work of different ministries and ensuring that the decision-makers of the country had the information necessary to decide.

She would of course accept. Mycroft was a genius but the men she worked for said she had a solid brain. They found her lack of beauty and her mannish grandeur reassuring. It was helpful, too, that she had parentage, and a name which the Foreign Secretary himself recognised, even going so far as to stop her in a corridor to ask after her father—Holmes, a good Christ Church chap, brains out of his ears, where was he now? ...Dead? God! But how? (The story of the airplane crash which had killed him was told over again; it made a good story, and Mycroft could tell it in a single, moving sentence). It was proof that she hadn’t sprung from nowhere, but was in fact the product of generations of intelligent men. She was a dab hand when it came to telling you what you needed to know, and so why not give her a good job—what with her parents being dead, and her a spinster but keeping Sherrinford House in fine condition on nothing but her inheritance and good Surrey air, dash it all?

And then she would begin to filter into London; slowly and thoroughly, as she did everything. And no one would notice her, or the steady extension of her control. But for the moment she was a fixture of the house. She possessed rooms in Westminster, but couldn’t be said to live in them. And she didn’t need Sherlock to announce that she was going for a walk. Sherlock was always going for walks.

Terrible, really, to be stuck between these two extremes: wanting to get out of the house so that she wouldn’t have to stick Mycroft and her silence, but not wanting to let Mycroft get free of her. No: if Sherlock had to be miserable, then Mycroft would have to be too. Which was why she was invading Mycroft’s inner sanctum, disrupting her work, reminding her that she could have her minor government position, but she would have to have her distressing younger sister alongside it.

Not wanting to give up without getting a reaction, Sherlock left the doorway and strolled in. She could feel Mycroft’s stare trained between her shoulder blades as she sauntered to the empty fireplace, inspecting the portrait hung over it. Some mustached ancestor: Father’s side, as Mother’s family were all the sort who preferred to be on the other side of an artist’s easel. Quite the inopportune match, as far as Sherlock was aware, but by the time she had been born it had been a distant memory; the Holmeses, despite being known and recognised as a certain breed, had no set and kept themselves distant from society—and the Holmes parents, when living, had kept themselves distant from each other.

Sherlock put her tea down on the mantel in order to pull on her cigarette, and turned slightly so that she could look back at Mycroft.

“Not tempted to join me?” she inquired, stowing her cigarette in her mouth while she spoke, so that it waved with her words. She turned fully, spreading her elbows and bracing them against the mantel behind her. Like Branwell Brontë, determined to die standing up. 

Mycroft merely quirked an eyebrow.

Sherlock’s mouth wrenched to the side.

Mycroft looked at her watch, and Sherlock snorted smoke. 

“I do wish,” Sherlock said, changing tactics, “that you’d left me well enough alone, when we were children. Would you _look_ at how I’ve turned out.”

Mycroft blinked once, eyes losing some of their mathematical focus. It was enough of a reaction for Sherlock to feel justified in having come into Mycroft’s study at all, though she didn’t feel happy, or satisfied. Had she expected to? She wasn’t quite sure.

So she threw her cigarette end onto the rug in the middle of the room, and left. To go walking.

Outside, the morning was slow to start, pendulous, full of unfallen rain. The sun slanted down in thick shafts in the gaps between heavy swells of clouds, but the day wasn’t bright. Sherlock could taste damp in the air as she shut the door behind her. Of course, the trouble with the house was that even when one stepped out of the door, it was still necessary to walk for a while to leave the grounds themselves; and even with that done, could it really be escaped for good?

She had gone to France, and it had followed her; had gone to Cambridge, and it had followed her. And she had ended up, in both instances, back on the doorstep with her suitcase in hand, her pride emptied out, her eyes closed; not wanting to push open the door, bring herself in, submit to the hot, masculine embrace of the sitting room where Mycroft would be drinking scotch beside the fire; where she would look up and say, not even coldly, not even unkindly, _damn_ her, “Welcome home.”

And now she was back again, in the doldrums of Surrey, her life slipping away between late breakfasts and sluggish afternoons. She could go to London, she sometimes thought; it was only a short train journey away. She could sell some of the jewellery that technically belonged to her, though that would mean the fuss of taking it to be valued, and struggling angrily through haggling and selling. Still, with the money that provided she could take rooms somewhere, not Westminster—and what? What then? What would she do for the rest of her life?

She was out of the shadow of the house, and wishing it would rain. She hated the threat in the air, and the stillness of the clouds, how they pressed claustrophobically downwards on the land.

Without her brain having sanctioned it, she had begun to move towards the lake just off the Holmes land; they had once owned it, but Mycroft had judiciously sold off certain sections of land a few years back, in the wake of their mother’s death. The move had rendered her surprisingly popular. With no male relative to be found anywhere, it had been viewed as nothing more than eminently sensible...

Sherlock tramped down the grass, her flat shoes and slim, straight-legged trousers leaving her ankles bare to the lick of dew and the brush of leaves. She vaulted over a stile and strode onwards, fingers fanning once by her sides.

What would she do for the rest of her life?

She was walking into forest, but it was all familiar. She couldn’t get lost here. (She couldn’t really get lost anywhere; but she could be surprised, that was it; London could surprise her. Surrey could only feed her past back to her.) Twigs snapped under her soles, and she hooked back the wild curtain of her hair with a forefinger, dragging it back behind her ear and surging onwards.

In Paris, she had put out advertisements promising _questions answered_ , and people had come to her expecting to hear their fortunes. It hadn’t paid to tell them their pasts instead. Remarking on their present circumstances had been even less profitable. She understood why.

She could go to London, take rooms, and interview with the Met, she supposed. Be a WPC. But it felt like giving in. The eccentric younger Holmes daughter might very well run off and be a lady police officer, and this minor aberration would make a fine subject for Mycroft’s next cosy corridor-chat with the Foreign Secretary. He would laugh; say, “Then it’s true? Well, and a jolly good idea it is, too!”

No. No, she couldn’t, wouldn’t be indulged, wouldn’t do anything which could be excused as _admirable_ or _sweet_ or _modern_ —

But what was this?

Sherlock stopped on the forest track, staring downwards.

There were two sets of footsteps leading towards the lake, and one set heading in the opposite direction. One set small, light, the other larger and dug deeper into the brown dust of the track. Only the owner of the larger pair had returned this way.

No: wrong. Sherlock crouched, dropping down on one knee. The impressions of the large footsteps, while the right shape, were much lighter on the way back, and spaced in shorter intervals.

She looked up, stood up, and began to run, staying off the path so as not to destroy the footsteps, leaping roots and ducking under branches, her breath suddenly hard in her chest and her mind crackling to life.

When she got to the lake she stopped, stared, panted.

The dead boy was naked and floating face-down in the water. A teenager, gawky even in death, his limbs akimbo on the surface of the pool. His clothes were neatly folded on the bank, as if he had taken them off to bathe. All save his shoes.

**GRENDON UNDERWOOD  
** **BUCKINGHAMSHIRE**  
 **JULY 1942**

So that was the holiday well and truly over with, Joan thought, slowly unfolding herself with a groan from the back of the taxi, and giving Sherlock a very flat look indeed. The events of only a few days ago—the hike, followed by...what had followed the hike—had left her with aching muscles and bruised feet, and to be honest, she had expected things from her Sunday which weren’t three-hour journeys by train and by cab to Grendon Underwood.

Sherlock was tugging her coat straight, tossing back her hair and impatiently waiting on change from the cabbie, foot tapping; when he gave her a handful of coins and said, “Wait a bit, and I’ll get the rest,” poking through his pockets, she sighed, very loudly and very rudely.

“Call the rest a tip. There’ll be more in it for you if you can be here in an hour’s time to pick us up.” This announced, she strode away, apparently not catching Joan’s look.

And that was fine. They had more important things to do, after all, than have a tiff—if they were in the position to have a tiff; tiffs were really for lovers—out on the street. Even if the streets of Grendon Underwood were far from crowded. Joan snapped herself out of her moment of self-pity and hurried to keep pace with Sherlock.

She shoved her hands in her pockets of her trousers once she caught up with her, and said, “I assume getting the cab right to the door of this place would be—”

“Bad security,” Sherlock agreed, and shot her a smile; a really very good smile. Joan felt her irritation recede guiltily backwards, and her own mouth curl up slightly. Stupid, to feel cheated, when she got to do this.

“You’re enjoying this,” she said. “Lurking around, having secrets.”

“Aren’t you?” Sherlock inquired, and Joan just huffed a laugh, rounding her shoulders and ducking her head against the breeze. Sherlock grinned. She looked, it had to be said, very beautiful with her hands in her coat pockets and her dark hair tangling across the pale skin of her cheek. They turned a corner, and Grendon Hall—a tall, pretty house the colour of gingerbread, fringed with white around its large doors and windows—rose upward in front of them, shrugging its shoulders back against the bright sky. Sherlock looked at Joan. “Ready?”

“Yeah. Course.”

They were stopped by a sergeant in the gatehouse, to whom they showed the passes with which Harding had issued them, printed with their names, ranks and F SECTION, ISRB; temporary things, he had warned them, but there was a certain thrill to thrusting them under an official nose and being waved onwards.

Inside, Grendon Hall showed all the familiar symptoms of requisition. Typed sheets adorned doors, and the smell of polish and communal dinners was thick in the air. People in uniform, most of them FANYs, broke from doors and strode with purpose, some of them glancing curiously at Sherlock and Joan but never stopping. 

Joan was conscious of her slept-in civvies. She had been reaching without enthusiasm for her service dress that morning when Sherlock had said, “Oh, don’t, you’ll be happier in trousers.” Because it had been so sudden—because, perhaps, it had been the first thing Sherlock had said to her that day which wasn’t about the case—she had acquiesced. On the journey up, she had judged it a good decision. Here, aware of all the pressed khaki skirts which kept fluttering by her, she wasn’t so sure.

“There you are!”

The shout was accompanied by a series of bangs and crashes, which resolved themselves into thumping footsteps after a moment. A tall Lieutenant with scraped-back red hair was clattering hurriedly down the stairs, clutching her cap along with a pile of files and a bright red non-regulation handbag. “Holmes and Watson, is it?” she yelled from halfway down, still moving. “Stay right there!”

A rapid-fire balancing act of a woman who constantly spoke as if in the middle of an air raid, she shouted her name at them as she grabbed each of their hands in turn, ignoring Joan’s attempts to brace up. “Beth Granger. Just off the ’phone with dear old Andrew—what is it with F Section and doing everything at the last damn second, eh? Madness. Such an amusing chap. You want Edie?”

It took Joan a moment to remember that Andrew was Harding’s first name, and by the time she had come to terms with the slightly terrifying idea of Harding and this woman being friendly, then swallowed the concept of Harding being anyone’s dear old Andrew, Sherlock had already agreed and they were being marched off along a corridor. Granger was yelling cheerily: “There’s a room down here you can use. She’s on her lunch break now, but try not to disturb her, won’t you? She’s got a sked in an hour, and shaking hands make for Morse mutilation. Right?”

“Right,” Sherlock agreed, and looked to Joan, her eyebrows up, telegraphing: that’s true, they do. Joan thinned her lips at her, and she smirked carelessly and looked away.

After getting back from Baker Street, Sherlock had insisted on being left to sit at the desk, her hands steepled before her. The phone had rung, and she had snatched it up, speaking in monosyllables but taking extensive, illegible notes without looking at the paper; upon replacing the handset, she had said, “Harding,” and Joan had gathered—from Sherlock’s few cagey monosyllables—that he had been giving her more biographical information on Corentin. 

And then there was nothing more said, or done. Sherlock just stared out unseeingly at the window, not even glancing towards the notes she had made. Finally Joan had left to get herself dinner, trying not to feel grim. The food at the hotel was truly terrible, but she ate without tasting anything—working up her anger, and then finally losing it all in a sudden wave of exhaustion. 

She had wondered, honestly, whether she was frustrated because Sherlock was so invested in her work, or frustrated because she knew that frustration was the proper reaction. The more she questioned it, the harder it had been to be certain.

So Joan had gone back to the room and found Sherlock asleep, absurdly early, the evening light striped across her fully-dressed body as she sprawled out face down across the whole of their makeshift bed. She had even had one of her shoes on. She hadn’t stirred as Joan had taken it off; not even when she stroked the red rub-mark along the side of Sherlock’s bare toe; not even when she kissed the back of her ankle. Fortunate, really, or Joan would have had to try and explain why she was doing it.

Finally Joan had unfolded herself from the miserable position of crouching at the foot of the bed, and settled in the desk chair to watch Sherlock’s shoulders rise and fall in breathing, hoping that she would be brave enough, that night, to change into her pajamas and lie down beside her. In the end, her thoughts had soured, started to tilt away from her, full of green doors she wouldn’t see again and Sherlock speaking in numbers, and then she had woken up with a crick in her neck, the sun hurting her eyes, and Sherlock pushing the furniture back into place so that the room would be ready for housekeeping to come by.

“Blasted thing’s stiff,” Beth Granger cried, “hold these—” Files were being shoved on her. Joan blinked and grappled with the sudden weight while Granger elbowed open a door and revealed one of those familiar studies-turned-offices. The scratched-up floorboards were lit by excessively bright bulbs, and the Queen Anne decor had been colonised by filing cabinets. “This’ll do, right? Right. Well! Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Joan said suddenly, putting her finger on what had been bothering her since Granger had started talking about ‘Edie’ in the tones of an older sister. Granger couldn’t be much older than Joan herself—but Joan had pictured Edith Whistler as being somewhere in the middle of her thirties. “How old is Ensign Whistler?”

“Nineteen, Corporal,” Granger announced, confirming Joan’s sinking feeling as she wrestled the files off her. “Make yourselves at home. I’ll go and tell Edie there are ladies from Baker Street looking for her. Remember; no disturbing. And, you know, the usual rules.”

She slammed the door cheerily in their faces, and left Joan and Sherlock looking at each other in the muted, dusty silence.

“‘ _Ladies from Baker Street_ ’,” Sherlock echoed, her frown growing steadily more furrowed and her lip more incredulously curled.

“Yeah, well. FANYs are always a bit Women's Institute. _Nineteen_ , Sherlock,” Joan groaned, shoving her hands deep into her pockets. Sherlock sniffed and started prowling about the room, dropping her coat onto the back of one of the chairs. “Jesus.”

“Not pleased to be outranked, Corporal?” Sherlock inquired, settling her elbow against a filing cabinet and arranging herself in graceful drape against the side. She was in civvies, too; black trousers and that same purple blouse which stretched tight over her chest and always reeked of smoke. It was the first time Joan had seen her in trousers which weren’t part of her battle dress. They suited her—made her look even taller and sharper than usual, outlining her against any background.

“Not that. That too, but not that. An officer at nineteen? Oh—it’s an honorary commission, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes. For squeamishness’ sake. Couldn’t send other ranks into occupied territory, so they bumped her up to Ensign.”

“Right.”

“So what’s bothering you so much?”

Joan raised her eyebrows at her. “She’s been in France, Sherlock. Came back two months ago. Probably still has a tan.”

“You went to France when you were nineteen,” Sherlock said. Her casual argumentativeness was totally transparent, and Joan gave a hard, wry smile, not feeling too annoyed by it. She hoisted herself up to sit on the table and rested her elbows on her spread knees, surveying Sherlock from across the room.

“Right,” she agreed. “When it wasn’t crawling with Germans.”

There was a tiny V-for-victory of a smile on Sherlock’s face. Joan liked it a great deal, and trusted it not at all. “Plenty of their sympathisers, though.”

“Not the same thing.”

“Still, don’t tell me you didn’t rough up a few Fascists in your time there.”

Joan was too startled to respond, thinking of Violette and her friends and the rougher nights at Le Monocle, when she had shoved herself between bigger, brawnier women and through punches, flashes of black, occasionally the film of blood, had seen Persie standing with wide eyes and her mouth dazedly open. And afterwards: “It’s not worth it, it’s not _worth_ it, Joan!”

Sherlock gave a sharp, laughing exhale, and said, “Quite. That’s the Corporal Joan Watson _I’m_ intimately familiar with.”

Joan almost jumped, blinking and looking her straight in the eye, an electric shock of connection making the stuffy air between them pulse. And the door opened with a noisy creak.

“This is Edie. Ensign Whistler,” Granger said, her voice exploding the silence. “Edie—”

“Sherlock Holmes,” said Sherlock, reanimating and shoving herself away from the filing cabinet, sticking out a hand. “And my friend Joan Watson.” No ranks, Joan noted. “How do you do.”

Edith Whistler was compact and neat-featured, with big chestnut curls. Not pretty, she was nonetheless vivid, with a face which, Joan thought, would normally have been bright; now, though, there was an uneasy pallor to it, and her handsome brown eyes were wary. “How do you do,” she muttered at Sherlock, gripping her hand but looking past her at Joan, to offer the same, “How do you do.” 

Joan was briefly, traitorously glad that they weren’t outside, so that she wasn’t obliged to salute His Majesty’s Commission as it rested on the brow of this nervous-seeming nineteen-year-old.

Granger had shut the door and left them. Even her footfalls were noisy, thundering away from them; distantly, there was the sound of her crying, “Old girl, what’s the matter?” and an unintelligible response, and then she finally faded from earshot.

Joan smiled awkwardly at Edie. “Take a seat,” she suggested, gesturing to the mismatched collection of chairs the room contained, and wondering if Edie knew that she was just a corporal, or that she was military at all. While Joan felt an odd reluctance to be mistaken for a civilian, interviewing Edie might well be easier without rank and discipline sitting coldly between them—oh.

Of course, Sherlock had introduced them with no titles, and had insisted that Joan wear civvies. She had been banking on removing rank from the equation. For a moment, Joan’s smile wavered, and then she worked it back into place. “Sorry about your lunch hour.”

Edie seemed to waver. It wasn’t that she seemed shy; rather, there was a certain urgent ferocity about her hesitation, like she was being physically pulled tight between her choices. Her glare was rather sharp as she turned her head to Sherlock, to Joan, and back again, over and over, looking like she was trying to force back words. Eventually, they burst out of her nonetheless: “Why’ve they—don’t they know I _won’t_?”

Sherlock and Joan shared a look. “Depends,” Sherlock answered judiciously, turning back to Edie. “What do you think they want from you?” 

“Ten years hard labour, if they thought they could get it,” Edie retorted, jerking her chin up and balling her fists at her side. With a shock of unease, Joan recognised something of Sherlock in the gesture—not the physicality of it, but the sense it imparted. “I’m doing a job right here, you can tell Baker Street that; I’m doing my bit, so they can’t tell me I owe them anything.”

“You think we want to send you back to France,” Sherlock said, surprised curiosity thrumming in her deep voice, her eyes interested. Edith stopped, blinked, surprise dimming her eyes and making her look even younger. Her mouth—once drawn taut—buckled under some strain. “We don’t,” said Sherlock, and combined raising her hands carelessly with throwing herself into a chair into one smooth whole-body movement.

Joan waited, and Edie waited, and then Joan looked to Sherlock to see that her hands were steepled by her mouth; a gesture which Joan recognised, with a sinking heart, as meaning that Sherlock had briefly retreated to some mental sanctum of her own, and that Joan would have to interact with the world for her.

“Edie,” Joan said, turning quickly to her. The name slipped out, but Edie turned wide eyes on her with no complaint, so Joan decided to stick with it. “We’d like to ask about your time in France, that’s all.”

But Edie was already closing up, rearing back, sticking her chin out again: “I told them everything. It’s protocol, you should know that. They took me in for debriefing.”

“We know,” Joan told her, using her voice like she was making promises. “We just need to ask you some specific questions—”

“Well, I _don’t_ want to answer them—”

“ _Ensign_ ,” Sherlock said sharply, clasping her hands more firmly together and then dropping them onto her knee. 

Joan stared at her, wondering if she was trying to pull rank she didn’t have. But Edie seemed to swallow, her face softening and aging at once, drawing away from childish fear. Sherlock watched her evenly, and finally said, in a cool, hard tone, “It’s about one of your fellow agents. A member of the Professor network.”

Edie’s eyes dimmed, shuttered, as if she were looking inside herself. Joan opened her mouth, and was immediately skewered on a sharp glance from Sherlock: don’t.

“I know he’s dead,” Edie said finally, and her voice was low and tired, matter-of-fact. She said it with a sigh. “I know Anton’s dead, it’s alright. You don’t have to tell me.”

Anton Durant. Corentin. Walthamstow. The murdered man picked up names like fleas.

Sherlock’s eyes were pale, luminous, and her lips were parted. It made her look hungry. There was something birdlike about how she was poised; chin tipped up, ravening for the worm. “Why do you say that?” she asked, then immediately answered herself, slumping backwards; “Oh, of course. Stupid. You’re a spy. You checked.”

Edie flushed faintly, but raised her eyebrows in that matter-of-fact way she had fallen into when Sherlock had addressed her as Ensign. She was standing straighter, more broadly than she had been upon entering the room; her uniform, with its officer’s insignia, seemed to fit her better.

“What was it?” Sherlock asked. “You were together in France, and you set up some kind of system whereby you’d find each other again in Britain. What—exchanged safe addresses, a place to drop messages—?”

“Personal ads,” Edie said. “I would place an ad containing the words Epping, brunette and firecracker. And he would know to call the number. I placed them every week, Miss Holmes, for three months after I got back. Now I place them every two weeks.”

“Nothing?”

“No.”

“Would he have remembered?”

“Yes. We were—it was—” Suddenly, Edie’s voice grew stronger. “I never kept what Anton and me had a secret from Major Harding, I’ll say that. I couldn’t, the Major—he knew soon as he looked at me when I came back from France. He found me having a cry after my debriefing.” She said it so casually that Joan was startled. Was that usual? She imagined it: a young woman with her skin tanned brown and her curls lightened by the French sun, hiding her face in her hands as she slumped in one of those uncomfortable green chairs outside Harding’s office. The light from the window slanting across the clothes which not hours ago had been a disguise and which now, back at home, marked her out. Passed by, because everyone knew, informed by office-building osmosis, where she had just come back from. Edie was still speaking. “And it was him said that these things happen and that it didn’t need to go further.”

Sherlock sighed. “Oh,” she said, her expression of hunger transforming with liquid ease into one of slight, disdainful disappointment. “You were having an affair.”

“These things _happen_ ,” Edie repeated, and finally sat down in the seat across from Sherlock, the movement emphasising her last word. Sherlock waved the issue away.

“Just a let-down,” she assured her, sighing. “I _was_ hoping you were going to say that Anton thought he was going to die and gave you a way of making contact with him should he survive and get back to Britain, because you were the only person in France he trusted.” 

Edie’s eyebrows leapt, a thin laugh jerking from her mouth, and Sherlock seemed to hear what she had to say before she said it, stiffening to attention in front of her. Joan had to look between them, and was only enlightened when Edie said, “Didn’t say it wasn’t _both_.” Her eyebrows were arched, and her voice cynical.

The seconds stretched, and Sherlock said, “Tell us.”

Edie told them.

Anton was mad on this one idea he had; and she, well (she paused, thinned her lips, but then with an even, unashamed look, carried on) she was mad on Anton. And who wasn’t a little funny in France? She knew _her_ head had been turned by it all, that she had started living not by the rhythms of light and dark, but by when she was scheduled to transmit and receive, and when she had dead-letter boxes to empty and meetings to arrange. A wireless operator had to be constantly on the move. That was what they had been told first thing. Some of them were lazy and ignored this edict. Not Edith Whistler.

“From the beginning,” Sherlock prompted, and Edie nodded.

“I was in Amiens,” she said, and her perfect French accent was a surprise when it interrupted the pressed-tight Middle England inflections which otherwise shaped her speech. “Picardy.”

She was in Amiens, Picardy, newly attached to the Professor network. She had been dropped miles away from the city, had had to strip off her parachuting gear and bury it with a kind of cold fear whining in her bones, keeping her breath short. Then, with her wireless set weighing down her cracked leather suitcase, she had walked for two hours and at last caught the early morning train into Amiens, smiling at the train guard, at the German soldiers milling on the platform, apparently on leave. A Frenchman had tried to help her with her case, she recalled, and she had panicked, scared that he would be suspicious if he felt how much it weighed. She nearly started to cry, telling him it was fine, she wanted to carry it, please; and then from the corner of her eye she had seen one of the soldiers approaching and had nearly fainted with terror—and anger, too, she said, at not having gotten further. The most horrible, frightened frustration. But all he had done was tell the other man, in his terrible French, to leave _mademoiselle_ alone as she was so clearly upset. And so Edith Whistler thanked him with her last dry breaths, and ran for the train as soon as possible, and found that when she was safely in her compartment, no tears would come.

That was the way of it, actually, she added tangentially, thoughtfully; she hadn’t even wanted to cry after that, not until she came home.

“The story, Ensign.”

“I’m just trying to explain what it’s _like_. So you’ll understand. About Anton and me.”

She had met him in a cafe, and they had pretended to be cousins. He had been her first contact. He introduced himself as Corentin, as was only correct; they were meant to know each other by code name only unless unavoidable. It wasn’t until two weeks later that he had told her the name on his French ration book and _Certificat de non-appartenance à la race juive_ , by which time they were, if not in love, at least willing to forfeit basic security.

“And this was—?”

“November 1941.”

“Good.”

Edie sighed, and leaned back in her chair, and Joan tried to picture her unzipping her parachute gear and burying it in French soil along with everything else which had connected her to Britain, all save that radio. It was difficult when she stopped talking. When she spoke about it, though, there was such a casual truth in her words that there was no option save to believe her.

“He was,” she said suddenly, “he was very kind, very—English. Everything you miss when you’re away from home, he was that. Well, except when he had to be French, and then he was French to the core.”

He had missed home too, Joan realised, thinking about the green door. Maybe that had been what had drawn them together. Looking at Edie now, Joan couldn’t help but see the sense in the theory: she looked like the sort of girl who, bright and adventurous, liked to go out dancing and to the pictures, who smoked when people offered her cigarettes and drank half-pints and was the middlest of middle class; who wanted to marry in a white dress, after she had had some fun. 

Fun here including being dropped into France. Edie was speaking again. Her voice was calm, definite.

“It’s not stupid of me to say I knew him. You might think that just because we were in France, because he couldn’t come to see me all the time, because we had false identities we weren’t honest with each other, or we didn’t feel—well, it wasn’t like that. Sometimes, when things are terrible, really terrible, when it’s all you can do to keep your head above water—I’ve never been so honest with anyone. And he was honest, too. Never mind what we called each other.”

“You’re sure.”

“Yes.”

“He was honest about his life in England.”

“ _No_ ,” Edie said. “About _himself_.”

Whatever Edie might think about truth, it seemed to break forth from her now. She spoke in a straightforward, almost stern manner, with a steady fervency burning in her eyes. Even Sherlock didn’t interrupt her descriptions, and listened as she outlined her two month love story in hard, accurate strokes. Joan found her mouth dry and her feelings strangely disturbed as she watched how Edie’s fingers dug into the arms of her chair.

“He showed me exactly who he was,” she said, very firmly.

“And who was that?”

“A _good man_.”

This answer, steely though Edie’s delivery was, caused Sherlock’s eyes to snap shut, lashes going flush against her cheeks in a picture of barely restrained annoyance. “Yes,” she intoned, her voice flat, “alright. Moving on to the last time you saw him alive.”

Joan gave Sherlock a sharp look which Sherlock didn’t register at all. Edie paled angrily, but aside from a muttered, “I didn’t ever see him _dead_ ,” she didn’t rise to it.

She saw him for the last time in December, when he came to give her a message to transmit. And stayed. It was no longer safe for her to stay in Amiens all the time, so she had spread out her operations, adding on cousins and sick friends to her ever-thinning cover story. The Germans, she explained, had known by then that a British wireless operator was working in the area; they just hadn’t know it was her. So the last time she saw him had been when she was staying in a barn in Aumale, helped out by a farmer sympathetic enough to shelter her but too scared to offer her a bed—as if (and she laughed at this part in her story) it would save him, were she discovered. There, while she was struggling with her wireless set, banging it on the side and hoping to God it wasn’t broken, the farmer had knocked on the door and said, “A man at the door says he is your cousin Corentin, and that the weather is fine, much better than in Amiens,” though of course it was some of the worst snow the region had had in living memory. The weather is fine, _il fait beau_ , had been their optimistic, overly-British password for when he came to see her. And she had almost hurt him with how hard she had hugged him.

“Yes, yes. But the message.”

“Well. It was like any other message. He gave it to me encrypted, and I couldn’t decode it. Just transmit the letters.”

“And how was he?”

“The usual. The same.”

“Not worried? Not...sad?”

“Oh!” Edie was laughing, her eyebrows arched. “That, yes. Worried and sad. Like I said: the usual. I told you, he was mad on the idea.”

“You failed to mention what idea, exactly, he was _mad on_.”

“Danger,” Edie said. “Dying.”

“What did he say?”

The laughter which had been haunting Edie’s features since she let it out of her mouth took a few moments to slip away, and left her looking strange, tired, older. It faded from her eyes before it quite allowed her lips to curve back down into neutrality, so that for a few moments she smiled unhappily into empty air. She leaned back. “Nothing,” she said. “Almost nothing.”

Sherlock raised one eyebrow, that was all, and tipped her head forwards slightly. Edie sighed, and pushed herself: “He would tell me that he didn’t think he would ever see England again, but that I sometimes made him hope. Stupid man. He said that I was the only person he could trust in France. He needed to get back to England, he said, but he didn’t think he was going to make it.”

“And you didn’t think to tell anyone—”

“ _No_ ,” Edie said. “Of course not. People died all the time. I know. I was a wireless operator. I wasn’t meant to code things for the agents who needed me to transmit their messages but because I was good at it sometimes I did. It was terrible security but what else was I to do? Leave them to it? They would have gotten it all wrong and their messages would have been nonsense. So I saw a lot of messages which I could read, even though I wasn’t meant to know what I was transmitting. And so I know that people died all the time.”

Joan nodded. She remembered saying it herself. _A man’s dead in a war?_

Sherlock took a deep breath in through her nose, her nostrils dilating. The oxygen seemed to visibly diffuse through her and wake her up; she uncoiled herself, sitting up a little straighter and focusing on Edie like she had only just noticed she was sitting in front of her. “I see,” she said. “And he never mentioned names. Never gave any indications as to whom, exactly, he didn’t trust.”

“None of them. He said there was a...a spreading infection.”

“How did he know you weren’t contagious?”

“You don’t ask people things like that when you’re in the situation we were in.”

“Mm.”

“You _don’t_.”

“Fine. You were part of the network too. You must have had your suspicions as to what exactly he meant.”

Edie was swallowing over and over, her throat working and bobbing. “It was paranoia. He was going funny in the head. We all were.”

“Then tell me how _funny in the head_ the rest of your network got.”

But it was the wrong tactic to take, and Edie’s expression closed with an almost audibly clang, her shoulders stiffening. “I’m not allowed to discuss agents currently in the field. You know that.”

“You realise we’re with F Section too—”

“It’s protocol. I can’t say anything.”

“We answer to Major Harding,” Joan interjected, leaning forwards in her seat. “We’re acting on his orders.”

“Well, so am I,” Edie said, snapping at Joan with a sudden, affronted look. “And his orders to me were to never discuss active agents, not with anyone who wasn’t him or higher up. Now, if you ask me, if it wasn’t the Germans it was probably the Communists. We didn’t like them and they didn’t like us. But that’s all I know.” 

Sherlock hissed out her breath, lips pursed, and leaned back in her chair. It was a long time before she said anything, so long that Joan could feel unease start to pool in the silence that she left, and decided she wasn’t going to respond. But just as Joan resolved to open her mouth and ask Edie a question just to keep the talk going, Sherlock said, “Fine,” puncturing the tension.

Edie was rubbing her hands together, clasping and squeezing them. They were very red at the knuckle, and her fingernails were bitten down to the quick. “I’ve got a sked,” she said, suddenly retreating back into a quiet childishness. “Quite soon. May I go?”

“Just one more thing. You said you sometimes coded things for agents.”

“Yes.”

“Ever for Anton?”

“No.”

“You seem very certain.”

“I would remember.”

“Was he a careful coder? Security conscious? Burned all his documents?”

“Very. Always.”

“No...codebooks, no writing things down, no _aide-memoires_ littered around his hiding places where people might have come across them?”

“None.”

“Alright. And tell me about how you left France.”

“The rest were relocating to Paris,” Edie said; shrugged. “Going to ground, regrouping. I was getting too hot to work as a W/T, and there was a safer operator already in position in Paris. So I came back on the February full moon. Black Lysander. It’s all on record. I was meant to leave in January—Anton organised a flight for us—but I couldn’t make it. And neither could he, obviously.”

 _Anton organised a flight for us_. Joan started quietly, but Sherlock didn’t even respond. If anything, her voice dropped a few levels closer to boredom. “Why not?”

“Oh,” Edie sighed, “bleeding usual. Trouble on the railway. It’s always the same in France. They say the Germans have organisation going for them, but _I_ don’t know.”

Even Sherlock couldn’t help a blink. Thankfully, Joan was speechless; all she could do was watch with an open mouth as Edie began to gather herself together. A drinker of half-pints; a down-to-earth girl, a nice girl, a girl who had buried her parachute gear in some field in France and marched straight on to Amiens, a girl who was good with codes, who placed personal ads for her dead lover just to be sure; a nice girl.

“I can tell you how he died,” Sherlock said suddenly, while Edie was standing up. Edie’s hands froze in the action of patting down her khaki skirt—and then her shoulders dropped, and she straightened.

“No thanks,” she said, and nodded to them both before she left. The click of her shoes as she vanished down the corridor only illustrated the quiet. Joan exhaled a breath she hadn’t realised she had been holding, and looked to Sherlock.

“That can’t be right,” she said quietly.

Slowly, Sherlock started to smile: all teeth and no humour. She brought her hands, pressed together, up closer to her mouth. “Can’t it?”

“Sherlock…”

“Don’t ask what it means,” Sherlock said, dropping her hands and fixing Joan with a straight, sharp look, “because I don’t know yet. But it certainly could have happened.”

“You think Corentin ordered the plane for her, not him, but she couldn’t catch it because of the explosion when he—? That’s too much for a coincidence, Sherlock.”

“Yes,” Sherlock agreed, her eyes unfocusing, so that while her gaze remained on Joan it was clear she was looking at something else entirely. Her fingers curled on the arms of her chair. “It is.”

Joan waited, but nothing came of the silence. She sighed, shook her head, and was about to press, before she remembered what had been bothering her: “Just a quick deviation from this bloke’s bad timing, but—did Harding mention how old he was?” 

Sherlock blinked, evidently struggling to remember a fact which she hadn’t deemed important enough to cement in her mind.

“Forty,” she said after a moment, and Joan grimaced, pushing herself up.

“Thought it might be something like that. Poor girl,” she muttered, shoving sweaty palms along her thighs to try and dry them off.

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Sherlock intoned, leaning back in her chair and shutting her eyes, steepling her fingers up under her chin.

“No? I’ll be sure for both of us, then. What was that you did earlier, by the way?”

“Which part?”

“Calling her Ensign. Trying to pull rank you don’t have?”

Sherlock’s eyes flickered open, staring straight ahead. Her smile passed over her face like a momentary shadow. “Pulling rank, certainly,” she purred, her voice smug and distantly pleased, “but hers, not mine.”

“Go on.”

“Perfectly obvious. Ensign Whistler,” she said, “will act like a child when you treat her like one. Give her the bedside manner, and she acts like an invalid. Trust her to be honest and adult, though—and look what happens. Remind her that she’s an officer and she becomes one.” She got to her feet, flicking back her hair. “An older lover probably did her a world of good.”

“Right,” Joan sighed, taking Sherlock’s coat from the back of the chair and holding it out to her. “Still—one other thing we got out of that.”

“Oh?” said Sherlock, eyes flickering with interest in a way that made Joan’s stomach flip inappropriately.

“The way she clammed up there—she doesn’t think it was the Communists, or the French. She thinks it was a British agent for sure.”

“Good, Joan,” Sherlock purred. “What else?”

Joan paused for a second. “Nothing else,” she admitted.

“Oh. That was all you noticed?” Sherlock asked, and turned her back to Joan. Joan blinked at her bony shoulders, and realised that Sherlock was waiting for her to help her on with her coat. She shook her head, slightly disbelievingly—but interested by the sculpting of Sherlock’s shoulders beneath her shirt.

“Yes,” she said, slowly, smiling as she thought of what would flatter Sherlock the most; unfolding the coat and holding it up so that Sherlock could fit her arms into the sleeves. “That’s all I noticed.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Sherlock hummed, and Joan could just about taste the smirk in her voice, so she ran her hands up Sherlock’s upper arms and enjoyed feeling the slight, invisible start she gave. It was nothing, though, to how Sherlock slowly relaxed into the touch.

“Tell me the rest,” Joan said, aware that she had her hands full of navy wool and hard, wiry muscle.

She could hear Sherlock’s smile spread as though it was disturbing the dusty air of the office. Success. “Corentin had bad coding habits,” she announced, turning so that Joan could see the side of her mouth, pulling smugly upwards. Joan felt a thrill of excitement, and squeezed a little harder at Sherlock’s upper arms. She thought she heard Sherlock’s throat click slightly as she swallowed, though her voice stayed even, satisfied, and Joan liked it that way.

“No,” Joan said, grinning, playing the part she knew Sherlock wanted her to play. “No, she said the opposite.”

“Exactly. She was very eager to insist that he didn’t leave anything lying around his safe houses and hiding places.”

“Which is suspicious because…?”

“Because she never saw them. She only ever spoke about _him_ coming to see _her_.” Sherlock reached behind her head and freed her hair from under her collar. When she shook it out, a thick black wall of curls smacked Joan in the face and made her laugh and wrinkle her nose, dropping her hands from Sherlock’s shoulders.

“Right. Is that enough?”

“Someone got their hands on the details of his codes somehow,” Sherlock said, shrugging and turning, straightening her lapels. “Who, how and why? How, at least, is probably explained by sheer incompetence. Never to be underestimated.” Her hair hung in a thick, triangular mass around her face, and Joan was aware of how full her mouth was. There was a richness about it, a lushness. Like you could gorge yourself on it.

Joan wondered when the next time she would get to kiss her would be.

“I suppose someone did,” Joan admitted, forcing her eyes upwards to meet Sherlock’s gaze. “This is...is all going quite nicely. Isn’t it?”

“So far.”

They watched each other with confused satisfaction, Joan feeling like she was feasting on the moment—until she got over-aware of what she was doing, and Sherlock hit the same stumbling block. Joan cleared her throat and Sherlock frowned hard and looked away, shoving her hands in her pockets. “Very productive,” Sherlock said, sounding gruff and a little vexed.

“Yes. Yes, it was.”

Sherlock licked her lips—a quick, jaw-dropping swipe of her pink tongue across her puffy lower lip, leaving it glistening—and then she left, suddenly swooping through the doorway and out into the corridor, drawing Joan with her as if by gravity.

Grendon Hall seemed quieter than it had done when they had come in. FANYs still flitted in muted khaki through the corridors, but there was a strained urgency in their pace. Even the printed paper notices (room numbers, reminders: please do not run in the halls, please recall that conversations on the telephone are not secure) seemed to curl more anxiously at the edges. “A sked, they kept saying,” Joan recalled. “A schedule?”

“Yes. To transmit. They’re receiving messages from France.”

Outside, Joan was surprised to find the day still hot, and the sky still blue. The light inside the office had been oddly tinny and timeless, difficult to judge anything by. She made for the gates, and then for where Sherlock had asked the taxi to wait, with Sherlock gliding soundlessly beside her.

It was in the taxi, both of them in the back and looking out of opposite windows, that Joan realised that the image which had come to mind of a woman crumpled in on herself and sobbing in that grim makeshift waiting room on Baker Street hadn’t been an image of Edith Whistler. It had been Sherlock who had jumped to her mind, curly hair and all. 

Joan leaned her forehead against the window with a heavy clunk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> I have two announcements to make:
> 
> 1) The current chapter outline is actually hitting somewhere at 30 - 33 chapters, so: that's what you're in for, essentially.
> 
> 2) As I'm about to head off to uni and be aggressively educated, I'm going to be switching to a different posting schedule for term time. Chapters will now be posted every second Monday, giving me a bit more time to breathe. ...Except the next chapter will be a tiny bit off that schedule, because I'm working around getting moved-in and suchlike. So: Chapter 14 will be here on Sunday 6th October. Chapter 15, then, will be here on Monday 21st October. Unless I spontaneously find myself with much less work on my hands than expected, this will continue until early December, and then I'll review whether I want to carry on with that or not.
> 
> I _love_ posting weekly, it gives me a highlight to look forward to, but I just don't think I'll be able to keep it up during term; thanks and apologies.  <3 Now, on with the very few notes.
> 
>  **"a St Hilda’s woman"** \- St Hilda's is an Oxford college, historically all-female (though that's no longer the case). This is the same sort of thing as Papa Holmes being "a good Christ Church chap"; Christ Church is another Oxford college.
> 
>  **"the Foreign Secretary"** \- At the time, this would have been Anthony Eden, who did indeed go to Christ Church. But that's the only similarity, and other than that this 'Foreign Secretary' character isn't much to do with Eden as a real person.
> 
>  **"Like Branwell Brontë, determined to die standing up."** \- Branwell was brother to _those_ Brontës, and his alcoholism and opium use contributed to his eventual death from TB. There's a story (almost definitely untrue) that he died standing up, leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done.


	14. The Fun In The Blackout.

On the train back from Grendon Underwood, Sherlock closed her eyes and thought.

She wasn’t the sort of person who could say that she had forgotten how long it had been since she had carried out an interview for a case, or anything so imprecise. She knew, with perfect clarity, that she had last interviewed a witness in 1939, in connection to the Carl Powers case. Three years ago. A long time, really, to give up what you loved.

That morning, she had woken up completely at the first breath of dawn sneaking around the edges of the blackout curtains, but she hadn’t been nervous. No—she had just felt portentous, heavy with purpose, unable to think of anything but what she had to do. And what might happen if she couldn’t do it. Energised, in a cold, heavy way.

Now? Now, blessedly, there was no point thinking about how she felt about it, or thinking about anything which had happened three years ago. Not now, when she finally felt that she was making headway in the case.

It was like lifting her head after a winter so long she had forgotten the taste of sunlight. It felt much too clean and all-pervading to be anything so unpleasant as emotion; closer to photosynthesis than happiness, she thought, and all the better for it.

Still, with her eyes closed, the train rattling along towards London, and Joan’s warmth beside her, it was easy to lean back and enjoy the sensation of being carried somewhere she wanted to go. She didn’t think about other train journeys; she thought herself deeper and deeper down into the case, mind lighting up n spiral patterns, thoughts hurrying smoothly across it like clouds over a sky:

(geography of the zone occupée—French railways—“forty”—rail charges—“il fait beau”)

“Sherlock?”

“I’m awake,” Sherlock said, opening her eyes and finding Joan looking over at her, very close, a streak of sandy hair fallen over her forehead, brushing her dark, raised brow. At such proximity, Sherlock was aware of every single one of her eyelashes.

For a moment, they blinked at each other, and Sherlock suspected her face of looking terrifyingly naked, just as Joan’s did—but then they both hurriedly looked away, producing awkward, coughing laughs and haughty sniffs.

Sherlock shook the moment from her head. Yes; she was awake, and outside was Paddington Station. She heaved herself to her feet and grinned as she swanned from the train compartment, taking advantage of Joan having to hurry to catch up with her; by the time they were level again, she had exorcised the smile from her face.

“Gorgeous day, isn’t it,” she said, tripping easily onto the platform and thrusting her hands into her pockets, throwing her shoulders back—turning to face Joan, whose brow was rivalling her cracked leather jacket for creases.

“It was,” Joan said, smiling her pleasant, bemused smile and nodding up at the blue lights which were being turned on above their heads, flickering to life with industrial buzzes and clatters. Through the arched glass of the ceiling, the evening was beginning to grey and deepen.

“You don’t like the blackout?”

“I’m just not sure it counts as day anymore.” They were cutting through the crowds, voices raised above the burble of voices and the background train station clamour; the talk of hundreds of people meeting and unmeeting and slipping to and fro between other people’s lives.

And in the middle of it, them. Heads up and hands in pockets.

Sherlock was conscious of all the times she had to forcibly turn down her mouth from something dangerously close to a beam. She kept suddenly realising that she’d been smirking absurdly for a good few seconds. By the time they were approaching the exit, she had counted five occasions on which she’d had to marshal her mouth back down into flatness.

And even then, she could feel her lips twitching.

“Who likes the blackout, anyway?” Joan said. Sherlock looked at her; raised her eyebrows. And Joan started to laugh. “Right. You, of course. The only person in Britain over the age of nine who thinks it’s great fun.”

Sherlock looked away, and didn’t bother pushing down her smile this time. “Let me convince you.”

“What?”

“Let me convince you of the good in the blackout.”

“I can see the good in—”

“Badly-phrased. Let me convince you of the _fun_ in the blackout.”

They were out on the street, and the evening was coming warm and thick, orange and blue and grey; people’s shadows preceded them everywhere, slipping over the pavements. Around them, buildings vied to block out most of the sky, pressing in tight. The whole city seemed vivid; not bursting with light as it had in its pre-war extravagance, but possessing a hard, strained urgency, stripped down to the dusty bones. The day had almost burned through, and it had left a tang of smoke and rubber and incongruous sweetness in the air.

“Okay,” said Joan, and Sherlock could have kissed her on the street corner for it. Instead she shoved her hands deeper into her pockets and just enjoyed the feeling of _wanting to_ , not feeling too cheated.

“Well,” she said, quite coolly, “we’ll have to stay out until it actually gets dark.”

Food, Joan argued, was in order; she hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and Sherlock—from the look of it—hadn’t eaten since the start of the war, or so she claimed. She ignored, of course, Sherlock pointing out that Joan had seen her eat. So they sat in a natty, faded little restaurant which drooped on a street corner and rattled every time a bus came by, continuing the argument in a lazy, desultory fashion and listening to a man’s voice crackling and sputtering on the wireless as he spoke about the war.

Joan ate; Sherlock watched. “Haven’t been out to a restaurant since I came back from France,” Joan confided, her smile crumpled and rather lovely as she glanced up from her plate. “But things are different on the Continent, I s’pose.”

“They certainly are now.”

“Not that funny, Sherlock, actually.”

“It’s a statement of fact.”

Joan rolled her eyes and took another bite of sausage and mash. Sherlock had already mocked her for choosing to eat yet more potatoes; she had taken it graciously, and not been dissuaded from her meal in the slightest. After swallowing, she opened her mouth, and Sherlock said immediately, “No new theories yet, no, but I do have five questions. However, the solution lies not in their disparate answers but in how they connect with each other.”

Joan snapped her mouth shut, and gave her a look. Sherlock raised her eyebrows. “Okay, I’m not going to ask how you knew what I was going to ask.”

“Good idea.”

“So what five questions do you have?”

“Why did Corentin die, how did Corentin die, who sent the three fake messages, why, and why couldn’t Edith Whistler catch her train?”

“Because her boyfriend had just gotten blown up on the railway lines.”

“I rather meant why did both happen simulataneously.”

“And that’ll unravel it, will it?”

“That’s the most important question of all of them,” Sherlock said, shrugging with casual confidence. “The key. Work it out, it’ll unlock the rest.”

Joan smiled at her mashed potatoes, and Sherlock narrowed her eyes distrustfully but wasn’t sure how to question it. Wasn’t sure if she wanted to question it. Joan’s mouth did look pleasant like that, after all. 

After a few more mouthfuls of her dinner, Joan swallowed and nodded.“Right. You know, I’ve actually got a few questions I want to ask _you_.”

Sherlock settled back, surveying Joan thoughtfully over her steepled fingertips. She made a nice picture, sitting there framed against the window with her windswept hair and cleft chin, London ticking away behind her shoulder; very simply English, somehow, in a way which was both strange and endearing. “ _Do_ you.”

“Yes.”

“What I really meant was _must_ you.”

“And what I really meant was ‘yes’.” While Joan was focusing on her plate, cutting up a sausage, Sherlock took advantage of her averted eyes to smirk. It vanished when Joan looked up again. “First off, is your sister _actually_ called Mycroft? And was she in a bad mood yesterday, or does her face just do that?”

Sherlock blinked, curled her fingers into her palm, and unwisely looked straight into the blinding force of Joan’s frankest, most guileless expression. 

Oh damn her. And Sherlock had just been thinking how uncomplex she seemed. “Yes,” Sherlock said, smile trembling upwards very slowly, “yes and regrettably yes.”

Joan laughed, and Sherlock started chuckling quietly along with her—looking away and clenching and unclenching her fist on the table, her cheeks feeling curiously warm—a little like she’d been drinking. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. The Conservatoire de Paris.”

“Not a question.”

“Just curious about what you play.”

“Ah. Violin.”

“Knew it.”

“Oh?”

“You look the type.”

“Believe me, I don’t,” Sherlock said, surprising herself with her own frankness. She realised she was looking straight at Joan again, which might explain it. Joan blinked, frowned. “I’m a woman,” Sherlock clarified.

“ _Oh_.” Joan nodded, eyebrows up; it was an expression of sympathy which Sherlock wouldn’t have accepted from anyone else, not on this subject. She didn’t like broaching it; people—men—assumed that when she did, she was making up for some deficiency elsewhere, as if she couldn’t prove herself by other means. “Right.”

But the subject was broached. Sherlock sniffed, still feeling a little prickly, but carried on to prove how perfectly comfortable she felt with the issue: “ _The type_ is largely male, born on the Continent...prone to thin moustaches. Judging by a sample drawn from my fellow violin students at the Conservatoire.”

“ _Ha_. Suppose they didn’t take kindly to you?”

“They took very kindly to me, actually, at least at first, because they thought I couldn’t play, and liked having someone to encourage.”

“And then…”

Sherlock’s eyes slipped from Joan to the bus rumbling past the restaurant window, making the whole place shake. She raised her voice slightly, though not too much. “And then I proved I could play, which upset them a little. And after that I left.”

“I’d like to hear you,” Joan started, but Sherlock spoke over her, voice cool: “My violin’s at the house.”

She had left it when she had signed up to the WAAF. It had been an intentional disavowal of a past life. Mycroft hadn’t seemed impressed, or even as if she’d noticed, which had been enormously galling.

Joan picked quietly at her mash, giving the silence time to defrost; waiting until Sherlock’s shoulders had lowered and she had leant back in her chair slightly. Sherlock had to admit that Joan timed it perfectly when she finally frowned, looked up, and said, “Weren’t _you_ born on the Continent?”

Sherlock snorted, but the corner of her mouth twitched upwards all the same. There was something endearing about Joan’s attempts to ask about what she couldn’t deduce; how she went slowly, painstakingly, through the facts, and visibly sorted them. Even better than that, Sherlock actually thought that she could understand it—that she knew how Joan felt. Hungry for small, intimate details. Like: “Surrey, regrettably.”

Joan laughed again. That, too, pleased Sherlock rather a lot. “Surrey. So how does a French-Norwegian get born in Surrey?”

“You’re unsure? That _does_ explain why you didn’t finish your medical studies—”

“Ah, right, it’s a dark family secret—”

“Both my parents’ mothers were foreign. French on my mother’s side, Norwegian on my father’s. Mother hated the thought of being English, Father abhorred the idea of being anything but. One of many disagreements in their natures. Anyway, I gather Mycroft got all the proper, English blood, whereas my character is a result of mixing Gallic unreliability with Scandinavian chilliness.”

“Who told you that?”

“It’s an unspoken society opinion.”

“Don’t tell me you did _society_.”

“Thankfully _not_. Mycroft and I decided not to be debutantes. Mother hadn’t the energy to protest.”

“You have no idea how relieved I am to hear that,” Joan said, spearing a last bit of sausage and grinning toothily before biting it off her fork.

The lone waitress was rolling down the shutters, preparing for the blackout. Her brow was scrunched up, and all light seemed to already have been quenched from her eyes for reasons of security. “Closing up soon, ladies,” she murmured, scrubbing strands of colourless hair back behind her ear. “Mind you give yourselves time to get home.”

 _Home_. Sherlock raised her eyebrows at Joan in a single flicker, and Joan batted the expression right back at her, understanding buzzing to life between them. For one thing, Sherlock really didn’t have a home worth returning to, and neither did Joan. They had a hotel room. For another, they weren’t going straight back to it.

“We’ll have the bill,” Sherlock said, and insisted on paying it though Joan fussed and thrust her hands awkwardly in her pockets, looking around like she wanted to avert her eyes from the spectacle of Sherlock’s money. Really, Sherlock just wanted to get rid of the clutter of change jangling in the bottom of her purse, and rather enjoyed the freedom of buying something without reaching for her tattered, oft-misplaced ration book.

Outside, the city was growing darker and darker, and Sherlock watched their lengthening shadows slip before them—hers longer and with the sharp angle of her collar clearly outlined; Joan’s stockier and with her shoulders and arms padded out by her bulky leather jacket—both stretched out, both shifting with each step. She wondered if she should take Joan’s arm, but looked to Joan and decided not to, because there was no need. It was enough to walk beside her; taking her arm would be nothing but a concession to vague ideas of what one was supposed to do, as opposed to what she wanted to do. 

When Joan caught her looking, she smiled. “So we’re going for a walk?” she asked. “In the blackout.”

“Yes.”

“Remind me, do you know this part of London?”

“It’s impossible to get lost in London, particularly if you’re me.”

“I’m going to hold you to that.”

They walked and walked, the streets growing emptier and cooler. Curtains were being drawn, shutters put up, lights dimmed. On one street corner, a flustered-looking woman and an ARP warden were half-squabbling, half-cooperating, in a kind of unintentional comedy routine: she would rush in, alter the cardboard in her front window, and rush out again, going, “How’s that, then?” and he would rub his forefinger against his lower lip, hum and haw—“Maybe left a bit—no, now right a bit…”

“You see,” Sherlock said, her voice low, once they had passed them, and their voices (“Right, put it to the right! —oh, it’s fallen down…”) were fading into the twilight. “Fun in the blackout.”

Joan’s arm pressed against hers for a glorious, secret moment. “Laughing at strangers. Yeah, every day’s a funfair with you.” She was grinning anyway, a neat triangle of teeth flashing in the dusk. Sherlock chuckled low in her throat.

She had missed London. Missed it! It was startling to be so aware of it. Usually her emotions were less easy to label. But as they wove through the streets—stepping over a ball kicked by an unruly boy whose mother was yelling at him to get inside, ignoring the wolfwhistles of a trio of GIs, catching the last light gleaming on the helmet of a lady ARP warden as she fussed with one of the straps on her equipment—the fact of having missed it, this, the clatter and hum of life even as the day became hushed and darkened, opened up in her chest, plain and simple.

Which was probably why she ended up remarking: “I plan on living here,” with an unspoken _when the war’s finished_ attached.

Even with the wordless caveat, the fact of having actually said that she _planned_ to do something startled Sherlock a little. Planning, after all, was an act of hope; furthermore, if one planned to do anything, and told other people, then failing to do it would be a _public_ failure. Fortunately, Joan didn’t seem to notice her annoyed blink or sudden abstraction. She just said, “I thought you already did,” and the slight subject change brought Sherlock back to the conversation.

“I’ve visited extensively.”

“It’s better as a visitor. Have you got a torch for when it gets really dark?” Joan asked, still showing a skill for gently loosening the grip of disturbing thoughts. Sherlock plucked a slim silver torch from her pocket and tossed it, caught it, grinned.

“I won’t need it,” she remarked, pocketing it again.

“You are such a liar. And a show-off.”

“No to the first, certainly to the second. What else would you have me do with this genius intellect, exactly?”

Blue; the city was sinking into blue; and into dark grey. The streets were shadowed now, steeping slowly in the dark, nearing the pitch blackness of night. The city wasn’t empty, however. People rustled in the falling gloom, switching on their torches, carefully pointing them downwards; the occasional car which growled by was heralded by thin slots of light. All the torches angled at the pavements resulted in floating, glowing circles, showing up people’s feet as they hurried onwards.

Joan’s hand knocked against the back of Sherlock’s wrist, and Sherlock had the ingenious idea of saying, amused, “Do hold onto me if you don’t think you can find your way,” which resulted in Joan treading on her foot.

“Sorry, didn’t see you there.”

Sherlock blinked in the dark for a few moments, realising that no one else, no one else _ever_ , would joke like that with her.

“Sherlock?”

“Mm. Want the torch?”

“Alright.” Joan took it, their fingers brushing, and Sherlock realised with a start that sleeping with her hadn’t made those accidental touches less potent. If anything, they were even more charged. Those fingers had been—had...

Joan had switched the torch on; was flashing it in front of her. Sherlock reached out, folded her fingers over Joan’s, felt them warm and dry beneath her hand. Lowered the torch. Looked to her. “Careful,” she said, “downwards, isn’t that the rule?”

“Yeah,” Joan said. “Anyone could be watching. Jerry, I mean.”

Sherlock took her hand away, and smiled.

The floating pools of torchlight were becoming less and less numerous, as the night moved in and as they moved into the quieter streets. It was nothing like the dark in the countryside, which blanketed the horizon and settled in comfortably over the hills, laying its cheek on the grass. This was hushed, stifled, wary—as if London were holding its breath.

Just discernible were the outlines of rubble, the ragged edges of buildings, silvered by the July moon, which hung in the air like an unspoken sentiment. Beneath, the torchlight illuminated Sherlock’s black lace-ups and Joan’s brown boots, passing in and out of the bobbing circle of light. 

“Sherlock,” Joan said. “You’re a wireless operator, aren’t you?”

Sherlock kept her gaze trained on the pool of light around their feet, knowing what Joan was really asking. “Yes,” she said. “Thirty six words per minute, if you were curious.”

Six weeks’ life expectancy. Harding had said it himself. Sherlock didn’t have much time for such concerns, but Joan…Joan took that kind of thing to heart.

_...even the brilliant ones have to transmit with German direction-finding vans circling like sharks…_

“You had to land yourself the most dangerous job on offer, didn’t you?” Joan said.

“Sally’s a W/T too,” Sherlock said, which wasn’t any kind of answer.

“What about Molly? She’s alright with Morse, as well, isn’t she? She’s not a driver.”

“Molly’s not going to be posted as a W/T,” Sherlock said, a little too firmly. “If she’s posted at all.”

“What?”

Sherlock had plans. They had been gathering quietly under the surface of her mind for some time now—ever since she had found out Molly could draw, in fact—taking shape without her really having to exert much force, presenting themselves as, well, the obvious and natural chain of events. And for a moment, an honest moment, she considered telling Joan about them—she really did. She wasn’t entirely sure Joan would understand immediately, but she wasn’t stupid, and nor was she impractical. Anything but.

So Sherlock opened her mouth—then took a sharp turn, and cracked her shins off a low, broken wall. Grit and rubble suddenly crunched under her feet. Joan swung the beam of her torch across Sherlock’s body. “You okay?”

“What?” Sherlock said, confused to be asked. “Oh—yes, of course.” Then she planted her foot on the ragged brick of the fallen wall before her, and stepped over, crossing from street to ruin. Then she looked back, raising her eyebrows in the vague direction of the torchlight. “This is how you have fun in the blackout, by the way,” she informed Joan.

Joan, to her credit, said nothing; argued nothing; just stepped over and came closer, her leather jacket creaking a little in the dark. From a few streets away, a car horn started up, then another; they both glanced in the direction, and then relaxed, standing close to each other.

“Do you know where we are?” Joan asked.

“Of course I do.”

“Where, then?”

“Give me the torch.”

Another brush of warm hands, and then the torch was heavy in Sherlock’s palm. She swung the light across the rubble at their feet; then across the remains at knee-height; then up and up. A doorframe still stood, just about; spindly and lopsided. Sherlock smiled and ducked through it, flashing the light back at Joan.

“Don’t run off,” Joan grumbled, but kept pace admirably. “Sherlock, what are we _doing_ here?”

“This,” said Sherlock, and turned off the torch.

If London had held its breath before, then now it seemed to have come to the point of unconsciousness. The black was thick, pressing, totally alien to the dull city rumble which still persevered, the hum of cars and buses ghostly in the deep dark. Closer, there was the sound of their breathing, heavy and loud, ragged at the edges.

“Oh,” said Joan.

Sherlock left the silence for a few moments, and finally said, “You’re curious about me. I thought you might be more interested in doing rather than hearing. I used to do this when I visited.”

“Stand in the dark and listen?”

“That and learn to make my way around without seeing. In Paris, I went for walks with my eyes closed.”

“Stupid.”

“Was it?”

“Yes.”

“Because I could have walked into trouble?”

“Because you could have walked right by me,” Joan said, “I mean we could have gotten this out of our systems _years_ ago,” and they started to giggle, their breaths buffeting the air between them—laughing harder—until Joan was clutching at Sherlock, tight, her hands at her lapels. “Jesus. I actually—I thought, for a while, that I might have met you before. At Le Monocle or one of the other clubs.”

 _Le Monocle_. The name sparked in Sherlock’s brain, fitting neatly, and she remembered her curiosity about those darkened parts of Joan’s life. The facts seem to shimmer closer, just out of reach; refracted as if at the bottom of a pool; glittering but impossible to discern in their fullness. Trying not to sound too hungry, she said, “Oh, no. Not my area.”

“Right. I was grasping at straws.” Joan was unpeeling her fingers, smoothing them down the front of Sherlock’s coat. “I—wouldn’t have minded it being true. Thought it might make it easier to know what to do with you.”

“What would you have done with me?”

—perhaps she had pushed too hard, because Joan was silent, breathing slowly in the blackness. But her hands were still on Sherlock’s coat, warm and heavy. Sherlock said, with swift dryness, “Naturally if you still don’t know, I’ll be flattered—”

Joan cupped her cheek with her hand and kissed her. Strangely it was her hand at Sherlock’s face which stopped Sherlock short, which knocked every thought from her brain. It was so careful and yet so certain, and her palm was rough, warm.

Beyond them, the city groaned and grumbled in the dark, and rats twitched through the rubble and the Tube thundered onwards and soldiers smoked service cigarettes and it was dark and films played in cinemas and it was dark and dark and dark: and Sherlock kissed back.

“I see,” she said, once there was space between their mouths to say anything, and Joan laughed a bit, her breath on Sherlock’s lips. Sherlock closed her eyes. It really made no difference to the darkness.

Terrifying, to be this close to someone. Terrifying, to be so glad of it.

“Is that all?” she asked.

“No,” said Joan. Then: “We should go back.”

“Must we?” Sherlock said. “We could stay—” She was leaning in, but Joan tipped her head to the side slightly, avoiding her, and Sherlock froze.

“No,” Joan said firmly, taking her hand from Sherlock’s cheek and putting it on her shoulder.

“Why not?”

“Because,” Joan said slowly, “if we keep doing this, we’re going to do enough creeping about in the dark.”

It took Sherlock a few moments to get any words out—standing there in the velvet dark, the city grumbling all around, and Joan talking in the future tense. She was startled by how urgently she wanted it all. It wasn’t often she was so deep in any present moment. Usually she could think of better places to be—more efficient uses for her time—she swallowed.

“Very well,” she said, after a pause she hoped was more stiff than speechless, and then added, a little more fluidly, tone loosened by slightly mischievous smugness: “We walked in a circle—the hotel is right behind us.”

After a moment, Joan started to laugh, and said, “So you actually knew where we were the whole—of course you did, I don’t know why I’m asking.”

In the dark, Sherlock took the liberty of smiling as she looked right at Joan’s face. Then she switched on her torch again, and by that white circle of light they picked their way through the rubble and onto the street.

The hotel porch was darkened, and double-doored so as not to let any light through when they slipped inside, but inside a dim light turned the lobby orange and a receptionist still slouched at the desk, chin on her hand. Sherlock and Joan blinked in the new light, pain exploding behind Sherlock’s eyes and diffusing through her skull before she got used to the brightness.

Seeing the receptionist made Sherlock feel hyperaware of her mouth, her lips, and how close Joan was standing to her. It was laughable, how people missed the obvious—laughable and fortunate, she supposed—and exciting, to be just a breathe away from public. 

Sherlock took the stairs quickly, while afterimages were still clouding her vision; Joan thudded along beside her, boots loud on the floorboards. Then came the jangle and clatter of key and lock, then the rush to pull the curtains before turning on the light.

Finally they were locked in, bolted in, curtains drawn. Sherlock stood by the desk, and Joan stood by the door. For a moment or two they breathed, staring at each other, and Sherlock felt her perspective tilt, losing the last vestiges of any reassuring unreality which might have saved her: she had just kissed Joan Watson in the middle of the blackout, and before that Joan had had her not four feet away from where Sherlock stood now, and before that—all of it, all of it was between them now, forever and for good. Painted bright and definite and inescapable. Sherlock’s throat was tight with scared wanting.

And Joan was striding forwards—Sherlock was pushing away from the desk, almost lunging for her. For good. Sherlock seized Joan’s jacket collar, and almost pulled her onto her tiptoes as she kissed her.

Good. Hungry. Breathless. Joan panted against her mouth; Sherlock moaned, not quite meaning to. Strange, how it was different in the light; not better, not worse, but different. More open? Less open? Sherlock didn’t know, couldn’t tell. Joan’s hands were untucking Sherlock’s blouse from her trousers, fingers pressing into her sides—hot, hard, demanding—but Sherlock choked, “Stop.” Joan froze.

“What?” she asked.

Sherlock opened her eyes and found Joan’s face close to hers—pink and blonde. It took her a moment to find words—any words.

“You’ve had a chance to undress me,” she explained finally, keeping her voice as even as she could, tightening her grip on Joan’s jacket collar and forcing her eyebrows upwards rather coolly. If anything, she sounded sneering, but there was a slight edge of hunger galvanising her voice. Joan only relaxed. “I rather think it’s my turn.”

Some nameless expression flickered across Joan’s face—some darkening of the eyes, or curving of the mouth—and she said, “Do you,” her voice quiet, restrained, amused.

“Obviously.”

“Fine.”

Sherlock grinned, breathless, and let go of Joan’s jacket to step back slightly, hands up, looking over her hungrily. What to remove first? Joan was standing with her feet planted firmly apart, hands open at her sides, and as Sherlock watched, she raised her eyebrows: _well?_

Sherlock darted in again, and started unbuttoning Joan’s shirt without taking off her jacket, feeling as she did so the warmth beneath, the edges of the cups of her bra. Military issue, even though Joan was in civvies.

“Intriguing first move,” Joan said, as if commenting on a chess match, but she wasn’t even bothering trying to keep a straight face. Sherlock arched one eyebrow at her, pushing both jacket and shirt down, off her shoulders, and finally onto the floor.

“Mine usually are,” she muttered, yanking Joan closer by her waistband. “Get your brassiere, won’t you?”

“Thought you were—”

“I’m delegating.”

“You’re lazy,” Joan corrected her, reaching behind herself to unclasp her bra and pulling it off, just as Sherlock—her breath hard in her throat, her fingers making short work of Joan’s trouser fastenings—discovered a stumbling block.

Distracted, for a moment, by Joan’s bare breasts, she swallowed and finally muttered, “Bed.”

“Now?”

Sherlock shook herself, wet her lips—looked to Joan’s eyes this time, and tried to avoid recognising any spark of amusement in her gaze. “Sit,” she said, nodding towards the closest bed, and Joan obligingly sat. The movement made her breasts move, her stomach crease, and Sherlock lost her breath watching her fingers curl in the sheets on either side of her. The way in which her belly overspilt her waistband slightly, and how there was a triangle of khaki underwear visible where her trousers were open, and how the light curved against the bare muscles of her arms, left Sherlock’s mouth dry, her hands flexing by her sides. 

Joan’s legs were apart. That was good.

Sherlock’s knees hit the floor; she heard Joan’s intake of breath. “Don’t get over-excited,” she said, though her own heart was in her mouth, enough to stifle the wry haughtiness which was supposed to be in her tone, make her sound weak and dizzy instead. Her breath seemed to keep getting stuck in her chest.

The boots, of course, were the problem; Joan’s battle dress ATS-issue boots, with their worn, shiny leather and ratty laces. She couldn’t get Joan’s trousers off if Joan was still wearing her boots. 

Sherlock remembered, suddenly, being on her knees just like this, months ago in Wanborough Manor, helping Joan with her socks under the furious stare of Lieutenant Turner. That, she had done on a sudden, urgent whim; this had more purpose to it. But it was the same impulse driving her, an echo of a feeling bubbling up then and now, over and over; the desire to be close to her, to feel enmeshed in the tiny, private details of Joan’s life, to tuck something into otherwise pointless moments and turn them good and—in short, the desire to—she didn’t know, only that it lay open inside her.

Sherlock didn’t let herself rest her forehead against Joan’s knee, just as she hadn’t let herself in May, kneeling the floorboards of that room in Wanborough; but she wanted to, a little, just as she’d wanted to—a little—then.

Their breathing hurried to and fro, loud in the silence, as Sherlock’s fingers slowly and carefully undid Joan’s bootlaces, and slipped her feet free of her boots. She had to go slowly, or else she was afraid her hands might tremble, and the idea was insupportable. Slowly, too, she peeled Joan’s socks from her feet, which were bruised and blistered from the hike a few days ago. At the back of her left heel—Sherlock’s fingers found it—was a crust of dried blood. Joan hissed in her breath between her teeth, and Sherlock swiftly looked up.

Their eyes met. Neither blinked. Sherlock’s heart felt a little ransacked. A little.

Sherlock suddenly knelt up, hands on Joan’s waistband, pulling her trousers down with her underwear. Joan lifted her hips up and Sherlock made a noise as she caught the scent of Joan’s wet cunt.

With fabric bunched around Joan’s knees and Joan’s hands in her curls, Sherlock found herself suddenly huddled against Joan’s body, bowed head against her chest, breathing hard into the echo chamber of soft, slightly damp skin, her fingers at Joan’s hips now. Hauling in her breath. “Joan,” she said.

And Joan pushed her fingers through her hair, said, “It’s alright,” knowing somehow that Sherlock wasn’t trying to get her attention or voice a query; just voicing a kind of scattered, sudden strickenness.

Terrifying, to be so comforted.

It was too much—this, Sherlock’s fingernails leaving their pink prints on Joan’s hips—too much, the smell of Joan and her hands in Sherlock’s hair—too good, this feeling of ridiculous, ridiculous sanctuary, as if anyone could ever actually be safe just because they were close to someone. Sherlock’s breath rattled terribly in her throat. 

“I don’t,” she said, hissed, “need you to tell me what’s _alright_ , Joan—”

“Sherlock—”

“We’ll stop in France.”

Joan stayed very quiet and Sherlock stayed quiet too, breathing like she had just come up from deep water, feeling the usual relief of having said something irreversible and unforgivable.

“Stop,” Joan echoed, hands loosening. “In France?”

Sherlock’s head against Joan’s chest had ceased to be much of an embrace; now she was slumped against her as she might slump against a wall, forehead to breastbone, eyes shut and stomach sinking. But she had said it now. So be it. “Let’s.”

Joan said, “Do you mean—”

“I mean sex.”

“Do you—want to stop now?”

“If I had wanted that, I would have said so, I—” desperation creeping back into her voice, the overwhelming goodness of everything pressing in on her, making her distrustful, making her angry because what on earth was she supposed to do with this “—Joan. Can we? In France.”

“Stop?”

“Yes!”

“I—yes. Yes, fine, we—” but Joan’s voice broke from her well-trained goodness and she burst out, almost snapping, “— _why_?”

Sherlock stayed quiet, breathing in the newness of things, feeling bereft but calmer at the knowledge that she had cut herself loose in advance.

She shook her head.

Slowly, she raised her head, kissing Joan’s breasts, pushing her face again into the space between them, mouthing over and over at one of her nipples until it was tough and hard between her lips: “Sherlock, _Sherlock_ , will you _bloody_ answer me—”

“Because I will be—” swallowed, drowned “— _busy_.”

“Oh, Jesus, is that—is that all?” Sherlock looked up, met Joan’s eyes with a hard stare. “I thought—”

“Can we,” Sherlock insisted, almost snarled, not knowing whether she meant _start here_ or _stop in France._ Either way, Joan said, “Yes,” and Sherlock buried her face in Joan’s breasts again, knowing that she could—would—stop.

She stroked along Joan’s inner thigh, and then rubbed between her legs, circling and pushing until Joan was breathing hard, until she was clamping tight around Sherlock’s two fingers, a slick wet grip—and God, Sherlock could feel her chest moving against her cheek, rising and falling. And then Sherlock kissed down, down, over the folds of her stomach— _down_ , to push her face between her legs.

Joan groaned and leaned back, spreading her legs further, keeping her hand at the back of Sherlock’s head, tight in her hair. Sherlock could smell her, strong and dark, good. Her fingers were still inside her. She had done this before, but the angle had been different; and the first time she had been muddled, lapping, positively timid—had Joan noticed?

This time would be better. More practiced. And oh God, she wanted it; she had wanted it since she had last leaned away from Joan’s cunt, her mouth wet, even the tip of her nose wet, dazed and breathless and unsure what she had just achieved. She breathed deep—curls tickling against her nose and cheeks, much darker than the hair anywhere else on Joan’s body, and wet, beads of moisture caught on the strands—and she licked, then gave up licking and sucked, just barely moving her fingers along with her mouth.

She _felt_ Joan groan rather than heard it; terribly, wonderfully, felt her cunt clench tighter around her fingers. Sherlock’s face was suddenly pushed tighter between Joan’s hot, damp thighs; Joan’s fingers rough in her hair.

Sherlock whimpered, and sucked again on the tight, hot bead of Joan’s clit, feeling wetness and spit slide down her own chin. Feeling Joan shake at her attentions, fingers clenching and unclenching in her hair. Sherlock’s own hand was cramping and it didn’t matter; she had found a spot inside Joan (and that was a thought; inside, secret, hers) she could rub against which made Joan’s breath catch each and every time, her groans starting to stutter, her hips jerking more and more erratically against Sherlock’s lips and tongue.

It was easy to get lost in it—the give and take, the slow, lewd pace of suck and groan and the shudder of Joan’s hips. And Joan tasted _rich_.

Sherlock made the mistake of looking up, and in that moment realised how close they were, how tangled-up. And Joan seem to realise too, choking at that moment of eye contact, throwing her head back: with a series of sharp shudders, Joan was coming, shoving herself against Sherlock’s mouth, her thighs slippery-soft against Sherlock’s cheeks, smothering—her hand yanking on Sherlock’s hair—

It was enough to leave Sherlock panting, though Joan hadn’t even touched her. Afterwards, Joan slumped backwards onto the bed, her hand still petting Sherlock’s hair. Sherlock was glad of it. It gave her a reason to stay here, on her knees, watching how Joan’s lips glistened, framed by matted, damp hair; how she clenched a few times; how her bare toes curled. 

Breathless; Sherlock felt breathless. Stricken. All through it, Joan kept stroking Sherlock’s curls. At least they would stop in France, at least in France she would be able to control—this. Control herself.

“Come up here,” Joan said, after a few moments. Sherlock swallowed, wiped her mouth, and stood up. Her breath caught immediately, as she felt her damp underwear shift and stick against her; unexpected. Oh, logical, yes, and yet—unexpected. And she wasn’t quite ready, either, for the sight of Joan sprawled on her back. She reflected distantly, weakly that there had been no need at all to take off Joan’s boots for her; she hadn’t got as far as completely taking off Joan’s trousers and underwear.

Joan pushed herself up on her elbows, grinning lopsidedly and slightly awkwardly. There was a gorgeous flush running up her chest and neck, blotchy and pink and heavenly. Sherlock put her knee on the bed to clamber up beside her while Joan was kicking off her trousers and knickers, and settling herself more properly.

She pulled Sherlock down into a warm, hungry kiss at just the right moment to call her back to earth, to Joan, to this, and made it long, lingering, lush, her tongue slipping inside Sherlock’s mouth and teasing a quiet hn out of her. She had to be tasting herself; the thought made Sherlock’s heart thrum in her chest. 

Joan pulled away, eyes flicking closed again. Her brow was, for once, smoothed out and unwrinkled, save for a few faint lines left over from constant creasing. They were face to face on the narrow single bed, breath mingling, giving Sherlock time to study her.

After a moment, her attention was slightly diverted, however. She started toeing off her shoes, and felt a sense of satisfaction at hearing them clatter to the floor. The noise made Joan’s eyes open, and she watched Sherlock with apparent amusement as Sherlock curled tighter and wriggled her toes in the bare sheets.

“Sensible,” Joan said, after a few languid seconds. Time pooled with the consistency of honey; the light, too, was honey-orange, flooding Joan’s skin.

“Whatever you mean, I doubt it’s that.”

“I was talking about your idea. About France.”

“Ah. Well. The one exception.” A smile quivered on Sherlock’s lips, which Joan’s mouth then caught; and they laughed, breathless huffs of giggles which warmed the sticky, humid air further. Joan’s shoulders dropped, and she sighed. 

“We’ll stop in France,” she promised. “It would be—insane to keep doing this in France.”

Sherlock’s relief—that Joan was prepared to put the arrangement under the heading of good security and look no deeper, that she didn’t have to admit to any choked, overcome fullness in her chest—crashed over her, and made her snatch her close in a pressing kiss.

Their lips parted with a sucking, lingering sound. Joan ran a finger along the row of buttons on Sherlock’s front, made her shiver slightly. Joan quirked an eyebrow at her.

“Now, though,” she said, but didn’t finish, didn’t have to; Sherlock nodded, shivering slightly under the feeling of Joan plucking her shirt buttons open one by one. “—you could wear a bra,” Joan added quietly, voice amused and a little throaty, fingers grazing across one of Sherlock’s breasts.

“Evidently I could,” Sherlock agreed.

Joan pressed closer, teasing Sherlock’s nipple with her thumb and forefinger; pinching, rolling, toying, until Sherlock’s lashes were flickering, her breath coming in soft, jerky gasps. She breathed in deep, smelling Joan and sweat and slick female arousal. Close and hot.

Joan kissed her, and kissed her, rolling her over onto her back, and with one hand gripping Sherlock’s wrist, pinning it above her head, as Joan’s other hand settled on her side, thumb stroking over her ribs. Sherlock opened her mouth against Joan’s, groaned against her mouth; Joan’s weight pressing down on her, pinning her between her body and the mattress, was good, rough, right. Kept her in her body.

Everything underwater-slow, thoughtless, dreamlike and hot, Joan unfastened Sherlock’s trousers and Sherlock drew her legs up to help pull them off along with her knickers. Her purple blouse was still hanging off her shoulders, only making her feel more bare by virtue of covering nothing—sticking, in fact, to the film of sweat she had broken into. 

She wanted to stay like this, at least for now; basic and physical and with every centimeter of her skin receptive. She bit at Joan’s lips, pushed her nose along her cheek, nuzzled at the spot beneath Joan’s ear with a warm, animal fervour, her mouth wet and pressing.

Joan was kneeing apart her legs, pushing her thigh up to the crux of Sherlock’s thighs, and Sherlock hissed, hips rutting and shoving forwards, her free hand clawing at the back of Joan’s neck and the hand pinned above her head flexing—

“Hold on,” Joan said suddenly, and Sherlock groaned as she sat back, releasing Sherlock’s hand.

“ _What_ ,” Sherlock whined, licking the taste of Joan from her mouth and glaring upwards. But Joan was—monumental at this angle, really, the lamplight soft on her rounded, full figure, shadows dipping and curving over her, from the bursts of dark blonde curls between her legs and under her arms to the wicked, crooked smile on her face. Sherlock had trouble doing anything but stare at her.

“Something I want to try,” Joan said. “I mean, with you. I’ve done it before.” She ran her hands up and down Sherlock’s thighs, palms rough, then pushed her legs further apart.

“What...?”

“You’ll see. Bend your leg up,” Joan said, easing Sherlock’s left leg up to her chest with her hand on her shin, so that Sherlock shifted, swallowed with a dry mouth, felt spread open. She pushed herself up on her elbows, eyes flickering down her own body and back up to Joan. Joan’s eyes passed over her with a kind of hungry wonder. 

“God. You are—you’re…”

“Alive?” Sherlock suggested, remembering what Joan had said—God, just a few nights ago—mocking innocence coming across despite how her throat felt crowded, her breath ragged.

Joan’s laughing, “Shut up,” was accompanied by a playful swat to Sherlock’s thigh. It wasn’t meant to be hard— _wasn’t_ hard—but it snapped through Sherlock, made her gasp. “Uh—sorry—”

Sherlock just blinked for a few seconds. It didn’t hurt, not really, not properly, not now the split second of sensation was over, but heat seemed to ripple through her, travelling like a flush over her skin. Her throat was full, her mouth parched. “Don’t be,” she managed after a moment, and Joan, _damn_ her, was stroking over the spot she had slapped, making it even more difficult to speak, “don’t be, it’s, ah, what were you going to show me?”

Joan swallowed, laughed a little damply, and said, “Oh, yeah, I—tell me if it’s not alright for you.” Sherlock nodded. Joan shuffled forwards on her knees, straddled Sherlock’s leg, the one still stretched out on the bed—angled herself and sank down and oh, _right_ , Sherlock thought; “ _Oh_.”

Joan’s cunt was slippery against hers, and her hand caught Sherlock’s leg again, gripping at the back of her knee to keep her spread wide and, “ _Oh_ ,” Sherlock kept saying, realisation and arousal mingling thickly in her voice; gasping and swallowing over and over as Joan rolled her hips and ground against her, everything _slick_. “ _Oh_.”

She kept her eyes on Joan, staring. A difficult position for her; Joan’s other arm was braced against the bed, trembling from tension—trying to get the leverage to keep her hips rocking. Sherlock was choked with the sight of her: brow sweat-damp and furrowed, lower lip between her teeth. “ _Oh_.” At every undulation, Joan’s body seemed to ripple, breasts jolting and stomach puckering, muscles working beneath her skin.

And they were so close together, everything hot and slippery—the noises obscene, wet—Joan gripping harder and harder at Sherlock’s knee, pushing her leg further back so the muscles at the back of her thigh burned gloriously; and Joan took a long breath and pushed, and Sherlock grabbed her, sinking her nails into the flesh of her hip, her other hand clawing at the sheets, scrunching the fabric between her fingers, “Oh, _there_ , oh—!”

She just about got her free hand over her mouth—bit into her wrist as she groaned and shook and came apart; her orgasm long, deep, shuddering, slow-burning—one hard, distinct quake after another, slow enough that she didn’t quite ever stop thinking, that she felt her cunt clenching over and over as Joan watched her and, oh God, must have _felt it too_ —

—the thought alone knocking everything from her, making her _moan_ —

Her climax faded slowly, leaving Sherlock’s throat full, her whole body shaking, feeling wracked. She made an involuntary sound as she dropped her wrist away.

“Do you,” Joan said, her arm trembling, her voice rough, “do you mind if I,” and Sherlock croaked, “ _Please_ ,” then felt an aftershock rush through her as Joan pushed again—again—

“God,” Sherlock heard her say, “oh God, you’re,” and she took her hand from Sherlock’s leg to push her fingers between their bodies—Sherlock whimpered, feeling Joan’s knuckles rub against her as Joan pushed two fingers inside herself—and finally Joan came a second time, gasping over and over. 

Hard breaths. _Hah—hah—unh_. Her face when her climax hit was open-mouthed, eyes shut tight, almost laughing; “ _Oh_ ,” said Sherlock, faintly, distressed by how perfect she looked. Immediately after, she hoped Joan hadn’t heard her.

Finally, Joan slumped down beside her; their legs still tangled, limbs heavy, they lay on the narrow bed. Their skin was damp where it touched. Hot. It was comfortable. Safe. That was entirely illogical, of course. Sherlock closed her eyes, the lamplight turning the insides of her eyelids red, and felt it nonetheless.

At length, Sherlock reached out an arm—eyes closed—and fumbled for the switch of the lamp on the bedside table. No point, really, in shoving the beds together now. One would do. “Are you—staying?”

“What,” Joan muttered into Sherlock’s upper arm, not sounding impressed by Sherlock’s decision to talk. “Until France, we said.”

“I was referring to my bed.”

“Oh. Yeah. If that’s…”

“Yes.”

Saying goodnight, for some reason, seemed both too intimate and too final, and so Sherlock didn’t do it; just put out the light, and curled closer.

* * *

Joan woke up to bangs and crashes—a sudden flood of light, the hiss of metal on metal and swishing fabric—Sherlock stomping across the room and hurling open the curtains. “—rather interesting,” Joan heard her remark, the sound of her voice filtering in through the last vestiges of sleep, “if, of course, you care about vellum.”

 _Oh Jesus_ , Joan thought, and for a moment just buried her face in her pillow, inhaling the scent of Sherlock off it.

Slowly, she came to terms with wakefulness. The world resolved into something almost sensical. There was a blanket thrown over her which certainly hadn’t been there the night before, she realised; beneath it, she was still naked. They had fallen asleep atop the sheets last night.

“Sherlock,” she mumbled groggily, while Sherlock continued to crash about—perhaps readying her suitcase, perhaps throwing over more furniture. (Joan supposed that wasn’t fair; felt a prickle of guilt for thinking it).

“Yes?”

“How long’ve you been talking to me?”

“About an hour.”

“I was asleep.”

“Yes, it made you much more patient.”

Joan wrestled herself into a sitting position, holding the blanket up with an arm about her chest. She was vaguely conscious of a slight tenderness at her hip, and realised with a sudden shock—the surprise sharper than the pain—that it had to be the ghost of Sherlock’s nails.

She was rather glad that Sherlock’s back was turned as she ransacked the wardrobe, so that she couldn’t catch the brief struggle for dominance which Joan’s emotions played out on her face; first her eyebrows nearly reaching her hairline, then her mouth opening, then curving in a grin, and all through it a flush staining her neck, making her feel hot. She swallowed, shoved her tongue around her slightly sour-tasting mouth, and shoved a hand through her hair as she tried to work out a kink in the back of her neck.

She was also rather glad that Sherlock’s back was turned because Sherlock hadn’t seen fit to put on her skirt yet, and so the white tails of her WAAF blouse just covered the top of her bottom, and didn’t quite hide the gusset of her tan silk twilights where they disappeared between her legs. It certainly didn’t cover the beige lines of her suspenders belt, where they pressed into the plump flesh of her arse.

“Hang on,” Joan said after a moment of appreciative, blinking distraction. “You didn’t unpack.”

“No,” Sherlock agreed, glancing around with her eyebrows up. “I’m packing for you. Train down to Hampshire leaves in half an hour.”

“What—damn it, Sherlock, why didn’t you wake me up?”

“I did wake you up.”

“Right, fifteen minutes before we have to go—” Joan was slipping out of bed, taking the blanket with her, tucked around her under her arms; Sherlock raised her eyebrows higher.

“You know I’ve seen all—”

“Different context, Sherlock.”

“Hm. Well, fifteen minutes to get ready ought do you very well,” Sherlock said tartly, nose in the air. “Or what’s the use in you being so army all the time?”

“Put a skirt on.”

“No,” Sherlock murmured absently, automatically, though she started to cast about for something. Joan supposed there was chance that the something was her skirt. At least her distraction meant that she had left off attempting to pack Joan’s suitcase—which now, Joan saw, resembled a bombsite, and contained a few things didn’t belong to her.

“Sherlock, what’s a bottle of whiskey doing in my case?”

“Mine’s a little too heavy, makes sense to share the weight.”

“You’re using me to transport black market goods. I feel so appreciated.”

“You should,” Sherlock shot back, grappling with her skirt and fastening it at the hip with sharp, wrenching movements, then reaching for her tie. “I appreciate you.” 

Joan stopped dressing—standing in her underwear with her shirt on her shoulders, the blanket on the floor by her bare toes—to look at her. “Okay,” she said, grinning, enjoying this: both of them fussing with their clothes, Joan embarrassingly aware of how she still probably smelt of Sherlock’s come, talking.

“What,” Sherlock snapped imperiously, “can’t I appreciate a friend?” and Joan shook her head, grin pushing her mouth irrepressibly upwards, unable to avoid smiling.

“Clearly you can,” said Joan, tone somewhere between placatory and amused, doing up her shirt and poking through the clothes piled haphazardly into her suitcase in the hope of finding a suspender belt somewhere. 

“Clearly,” Sherlock said, and Joan felt the vibrations through the floorboards as she stepped closer, but didn’t expect her to kiss her. 

“Mm—” Too wet to be a peck, the kiss was nonetheless quick, almost perfunctory. Sherlock sniffed and darted away from her in seconds, ducking in front of a mirror to adjust her tie with irritable, perfectionist movements—put-on, of course, Joan thought, smiling strangely at the back of her head, because Sherlock never gave a damn about her tie, and the knot was always off-centre in a way which made her look elegantly careless. How anyone could make a WAAF uniform elegantly careless…

Joan watched her, heart suddenly hurting—something about Sherlock’s neat, perfunctory getting-ready movements, the nakedness of her gestures when she wasn’t acting for any audience but Joan, was painful. Almost raw.

It didn’t seem real, that Sherlock—standing right there, primping the twin devil horn rolls at her temples, straightening her collar—would in a few weeks be in France, and that Joan would be with her, and that they would be working. More than that; Sherlock would be transmitting back to Britain—always moving, always evading, when she wasn’t sitting in front of a wireless set and quite literally presenting a homing beacon to any number of Gestapo.

It would be better, then, to call it off while they were in France. This was almost too much of a secret to keep.

But Joan watched her while she lit a cigarette (the first of the day? —the fourth?) and sighed out smoke, and pulled on her tunic over her blouse and skirt. As Joan pulled on her own uniform and smoothed back her hair as best as she could, spitting toothpaste into the basin of the washstand, frowning at her puffy, rectangular face in the mirror—she watched her, in the very edge of her vision, fascinated by the flickering normality clinging to her like an ill-fitting dress; the smallness of her gestures.

And by then she was ready. They weren’t going to do this again—close the door on the world and enjoy a few square metres of privacy behind blackout curtains and a lock.

“Shall we?” Sherlock was holding the door for her, weight on one hip; there was something gentlemanly about it which made Joan smile faintly.

“Yeah,” she said.

Sherlock must have caught something, some strangeness in Joan’s tone, because their eyes met and Joan had the sense of the moment stretched, drawing tight—and then bursting, as Sherlock flicked up her collar, and Joan straightened, throwing back her shoulders, and they both left the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aw, I like this chapter. Thanks for reading, as ever! We're still on term-time posting which means one chapter every two weeks, and from now on will be back to Mondays—so Chapter 15 will be posted on Monday 21st October.
> 
>  **"a restaurant"** \- As Sherlock later notes, one didn't need a ration book to eat in a restaurant, though it was expensive and there were limits on the number of courses available.
> 
>  **"decided not to be debutantes"** \- At this point, debutantes in the UK (young, upper class or aristocratic women who had reached 'marriageable age' and whose 'coming out' marked the beginning of the social season) were presented in court to the Sovereign. (The Queen got rid of this in 1958). I'm just throwing this in because can you _imagine_ Sherlock or Mycroft gritting their teeth through that? Clearly it's best they stayed away.
> 
>  **"ARP warden** \- Air raid precaution warden. Although air raids weren't on-going in 1942 (the Blitz was over and the 'little Blitz' not yet begun), blackouts were still enforced.


	15. Je Ne La Connais Pas.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **WARNINGS** for interrogation, implications of/discussions of torture.

“Oh God please don’t do this,” Joan had gabbled in French when they dragged her from her bed, but they had dragged her all the same, even though she had gasped and twisted and insisted she had done nothing wrong— _nothing_.

How long had it been now? An hour, at least; an hour of being handcuffed, shivering, to this chair in this cellar, under this bulb; an hour, at least, of trying to concentrate on the wild, reeling flashes which her vision seemed to come in.

She was freezing cold. They had turned the hose on her the moment she had stumbled into the cellar, left her gasping and yelling—but she had yelled in French, at least, and she hadn’t been so stupid as to try to fight back.

Her pajamas were soaked through, her hair dripping down her face. And she was still speaking French. She could hear herself do it. Natural as any of the Parisian patrons of Le Monocle.

What was her name? Delphine Laurent—it was on her papers. Occupation? A little sewing—she took it in—it was so hard to get work—difficult, her husband three years dead—

She reeled off the story she had been given, stammering it like it was the truth, cringing away from their questions as if she were really revealing anything.

There were two of them, of course; that was the usual protocol, and she was a usual case. That was clear. They were snapping a mix of French and German at her and didn’t have the decency to seem angry. It was terrible, how bored they seemed, how frustrated with her. Like she was a tedious bit of grunt work.

“Non, non—” Fluent; she was fluent; wordperfect down to every last cracked, scared syllable. Fluent as she had been, telling Lulu, “I can’t work tonight,” “Je ne peux pas travailler ce soir,” and clutching Persie’s hand, a secret message transmitted between their touching palms: now one of the men was banging on the table.

“This woman,” he said, _cette femme_ , and Joan realised that he hadn’t just been slapping the wood; he had been slamming down a photograph. She focused on it now. She thought: how unrealistic. That photograph’s not even crumpled. And how did they get it? It was of Sherlock, of course. It was the picture she must have gotten taken upon passing out of training and becoming a fully-fledged WAAF; it showed her in a stiff new uniform, her mouth slightly slanted and her eyes unreachable, far away, gently mocking. Lovely. Belle. Belle. Beautiful in French sounded so stupid.

“Je ne la connais pas,” she was saying: I don’t know her, I don’t know her. She was thinking of Le Monocle and Violette, her big, brawny arms, the black eye Joan had come home with and Persie’s horrified gasps, her fluttering, helpless hands, how Joan had just muttered, “C’est une conne fasciste,” _she’s a fascist cunt_. But all she said now, to these men, was I don’t know her, I don’t know her. 

Sherlock’s mouth was beautiful in the picture. She looked sad. And then Joan couldn’t see her; she was in blackness, after-images floating and bursting in front of her. The light above her had been shut off. It wasn’t that the room was totally dark without it, just that all vestiges of night vision had been burnt out of her by the glare. She closed her eyes.

The cuffs were loosened, and clicked off her, warm fingers brushing against her skin. From above her in the dark, Harding said, “Alright, Watson. That was good. Hopkins, fetch the Corporal a cup of tea. And a blanket, for Christ’s sake.”

* * *

It was four in the morning, July in the New Forest, and the woodland smell floated through the air, sharp and sweet even inside the disused groundskeeper’s shed which had been passing for a Gestapo cellar.

“You realise I’m not keeping you here, Corporal,” Harding said, resting his tin mug against his stomach. He was still in the ill-fitting, makeshift German uniform he had donned for the sake of the exercise. The grey, small-hour light made him look older than usual, and not for the first time Joan wondered about his real age. He was probably forty or so; maybe older. “You can go back up to bed.”

Joan, wrapped in a blanket over her still-drenched pajamas, clutching her own tin mug, said, “Right. I can.”

Harding nodded, and that seemed to be that. They stayed where they were, on either side of the desk. The ends of the two crooked cigarettes which Harding had rolled for them smouldered quietly on top of it, charring the wood.With its spindly and mismatched furniture, and its damp walls, the shed really did a poor job of mimicking a Gestapo torture chamber. Joan, feeling fuzzy and disconnected, blinked. She had a headache.

“You don’t need to be here either, sir,” she pointed out, and Harding snorted.

“Right, yeah,” he said. “Thanks for that permission to leave, Watson.”

“Mm. No. Just.”

“Easy.”

Joan grimaced, and took another swallow of tea. “God, I need to sleep.”

“Me too.”

She kept looking at Harding. He wasn’t staying at this latest training school; he came and went, commuting to and from London, with no pattern discernible in his movements. He sat in on lectures, training exercises, occasionally accosted them in corridors with his brows drawn tight and his voice hard. Joan hadn’t seen him here in a few days; Joan had never seen him look so tired.

“So,” she said, unwilling to let the silence stiffen, “that—went well, did it?”

“It did. What did you think of my acting?”

Joan gave a faint smile which fell quickly, tiredly, but was nonetheless genuine. “Impressive, especially considering your natural disadvantages, sir.”

“Those being what?”

“Red hair and green eyes, sir. Can’t buy you as a German. Irish, maybe.”

Harding laughed at that, a great, booming laugh. “You wouldn’t be the first.”

Joan grinned, and clamped her hands tighter on her mug, seeking out warmth but also endeavouring not to spill any of the tea inside it. Her whole body was trembling very finely. “How come you’ve got time for this, sir? You’re Deputy Director of F Section. Why not stay in Baker Street?”

“I don’t stay in Baker Street because if I did that, Watson, I’d forget about the people on the ground.” Harding took a long swallow of tea, kissed his teeth. “Easy to do. Out of sight, out of mind. And believe it or not, I prefer to invest in good, solid agent training rather than pushing paper in an office.”

“But you do push paper. Sometimes.”

“That and more.”

“Tactical decisions.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny.”

“Varied work, then.” She was pushing it, she knew, without even being sure of the direction in which she was doing so. Harding was looking at her with reserved amusement, however—apparently not displeased with her line of inquiry.

“Yes, Corporal,” he said. “If you’re trying to ask if I hate free time as much as you do, the answer’s yes.”

Joan was surprised into a gulping, awkward laugh. After a moment Harding’s grin stretched wider and he started to chuckle, low and smoke-cracked.

“I don’t,” Joan protested. “I really—I do not hate free time, sir.”

“You’re right,” Harding agreed. “You’re scared of it.”

Joan laughed again, but this time Harding didn’t join in, and she stopped herself, gulped down a mouthful of tea. Outside, birds began to call—tentatively, as if feeling out the parameters of the dawn; expecting to be plunged back into night at any moment.

It was quiet for too long. Joan had to ask.

“Do you always stay with people after you mock-interrogate them, sir?” She was pressing her teeth together to stop them chattering, and her words came out unintentionally strangled.

“When I can. Usually they swear at me.”

“Even the girls?”

“Especially the girls. Want to try?”

“I’m okay,” Joan said, and was startled to realise it was true. She took another gulp of tea. “Please tell me I don’t have to be up in two hours.”

“You don’t have to be up in two hours.”

“Thanks. Great.”

They returned to their respective mugs and their respective thoughts, and Joan’s thoughts, predictably, were about Sherlock. Sherlock, who was up in bed right now, sleeping or—more likely—lying in the dark and thinking, brain burning away as she huddled under her sheets. Probably she hadn’t even noticed Joan was gone. She certainly hadn’t stirred as Joan had been manhandled from her bed as part of the exercise, though both Molly and Sally had sat bolt-upright.

Joan swallowed more of her tea. She wanted to be in bed, though she had the horrible feeling she might not sleep now that thoughts of Sherlock had stirred in her brain.

“Your French is alright, though, sir,” she said, though, a little lamely, seeking to fill the silence—and seeking to make Harding grin when she added, “for a German, I mean.”

It succeeded—his crooked mouth turned up at the side—but he said, without any coldness, “Watch the cheek.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“You’re right, though. Where you’re going, you’re more likely to be dragged from your bed by a pro-German _gendarme_ , not Jerry himself, but damned if I’m going to pass for French any time soon.”

His tone was remarkably careless. He sounded so little like he had just let slip that Joan was to be posted in Vichy France rather than the Occupied Zone, that at first Joan didn’t believe he had let anything slip at all.

But she stared at him, feeling the realisation _drip—drip—drip_ slowly down into the pit of her stomach.

Of course, to let on that she understood would be traitorous. The whole point in his careless, indirect admission, was that information should pass between them without being spoken clearly. She swallowed, shrugged. “Made up for it with the hose, I think, sir.”

“Yeah, I was proud of that. Cold?”

“Freezing.”

“Good. Finished your tea?”

“Yessir.”

“Get to bed, then. That’s an order.” Joan stood up, pulling the blanket off her shoulders and leaving it draped over the back of the chair, trying not to shiver. “Watson?”

“Sir?”

Harding rested his cup of tea on his stomach, where it strained the black fabric of his makeshift German uniform. “You’ll do alright in France,” he said, looking her right in the eye.

Joan blinked once, and wavered terribly, suddenly exhausted and aware of the absurdity of her situation. Something about Harding’s frank, unremarkable tone made her heart suddenly tight with gratitude. She wanted to salute, but neither of them was in uniform, and her sleep-deprived mind was shrinking from the idiosyncrasies of military protocol, leaving her blinking and her head aching.

Her hand twitched by her side and she gave up, finally asking weakly, “Do I—”

“Not when I’m dressed as bloody Fritz, Watson!” Harding roared, and Joan, with utmost relief and gratitude, braced up, and left with as much military bearing as she could muster.

Outside, the morning was breaking above the trees which hemmed in the estate. Beaulieu. Another mansion, this one probably the most impressive they had been stationed in; huge and grey without being severe, or anything short of frankly fairy-taleish. Sally—after Harding’s address a few days ago, when he had finally announced the name and purpose of their work to the recruits at large, Sherlock and Joan purposefully looking straight forwards and not catching each other’s eyes—had thrown her suitcase down on her bed and huffed, “Special Operations Executive, more like Stately ’Omes of England.”

“Seriously Obnoxious Eavesdroppers,” Joan had suggested.

Molly had offered, “Shoddily-Organised Espionage?” 

Sherlock had rolled her eyes at all of them and lit a cigarette as disdainfully as possible.

The thought of Sherlock made Joan’s throat convulse as she slipped in through the backdoor and started mounting the stairs in the half-light.

The Professor network—Sherlock’s destination—was in the Occupied Zone, of course. Once in Picardy, now having upped sticks to Paris. Far away, in other words, from where Joan was headed.

Honestly, it was good. A relief. They had agreed, after all, that it would be too complex for them to keep up what they had been doing while in France, and now there was no need to rely upon mere willpower and good sense to uphold the decision. After all, neither willpower nor good sense had exactly proved themselves trustworthy of late. Now there would be miles of foreign country and a well-policed demarcation line between them.

Honestly, it was good.

Halfway up the stairs, Joan stopped, closed her eyes, clutched tight to the bannister, and wondered who she was fooling.

It didn’t matter if she couldn’t sleep with Sherlock. She would have managed to keep away if they had been posted to the same network. They would have worked it out; and circumstances in France, anyway, would have conspired to keep everything—sensible.

Being away from her, though—Joan bowed her head, pinched the bridge of her nose. Sitting somewhere in the South while Sherlock was miles away, surrounded by Gestapo and not even able to trust her own fellow agents. That—that was...

That was what was going to happen. The end. Joan took a deep breath, lifted her chin from her chest, and forced herself onwards, up two flights, until she came to the room allocated to the women on the course.

There was a glow of light from under the door. Joan blinked, frowned, refocused her attention outwards. Then, exhausted as she was, she grinned even though her teeth were chattering and her sleep-deprived headache was making every muscle in her face hurt, to say nothing of the knots of tension at her temples and behind her eyes.

She bent, and put her mouth close to the door to do her best ARP Warden impression: “Shut that lamp off in there!”

The door clicked open, revealing Sherlock in her non-regulation nightgown—the pale blue silk one which had to be black market—and her eyebrows raised.

“Welcome back, Corporal,” she said, her voice deep and pleased, mouth curled. Joan worked her mouth into a smile and wished that either they could have their own room, or that Sherlock would leave off wearing that damned nightgown and smiling that way.

“Oh God, finally,” came Sally’s voice from somewhere in the background, a moan muffled by pillows. “Does this mean we can stop holding a vigil?”

Molly, in dressing gown and pajamas, appeared beside Sherlock, face creased with sleep and anxiety: “Joan, you’re soaked!”

“Yeah,” Joan agreed weakly, while Molly was pulling her in and starting to go through Joan’s clothes looking for something dry, and Sherlock hovered like a mildly-interested vulture by her side. She could feel her, silk-hot, brushing against her at inopportune moments. Bright electric touches. God her head hurt. “Hose. Harding’s a madman.”

“Major Harding’s here? He interrogated you?”

“Yeah. Enjoyed it, too. Why are you all up?”

It transpired, of course, that Sherlock had turned on the light and insisted on sitting up to wait for Joan’s return, ignoring Sally’s threats and Molly’s polite, exhausted suggestions. Joan didn’t know why she had done it, but was faintly touched, as well as seriously apologetic.

Finally, when the lights were turned off, and Joan had said sorry on Sherlock’s behalf because Sherlock just looked bewildered when it was suggested that she apologise herself, Joan dropped a hand into the space between her bed and Sherlock’s, and found Sherlock’s fingers dangling there. She squeezed her hand once, and Sherlock gripped back.

Joan, too tired to really sleep, nevertheless felt herself fall away into a half-doze, Sherlock’s fingers hot against her palm. She didn’t so much think as find herself washed up on the shores of her own mind, thinking about—cover, actually, and the strangeness of clutching Sherlock’s hand in the dark, while not feet away from them Molly and Sally were lying in their beds.

They had been at Beaulieu for two weeks, a measurement of time which Joan forced herself to use in place of counting hurried, snatching kisses (five) and one frantic, hard-edged interlude of shove-push-grunt- _gasp_ in a steam-soaked bathroom. Despite the distraction of frustrated intentions, the actual instruction had caught Joan’s attention, largely through being—at first—almost too much to take seriously. Had it been delivered seriously, or grandly, or with any kind of solemnity, it would have been impossible not to find it ridiculous. Instead, however, the instructors treated their various subjects with matter-of-fact practicality, in the face of which most amusement could only shrink back.

There was burglary, disguise, cover, lock-picking, forgery, coding, sniper training, torture resistance, how to pass on messages covertly, how to tail someone discreetly. The jargon came on thick: they learnt about dead drops and live drops, tradecraft and street artists. All these complicated shades of meaning, this knowing without saying; speech which didn’t pin down its own meaning but circled it instead, outlined it for any knowing listener and remained opaque to everyone else. Joan was familiar with it. Spies, it transpired, had that queer habit of referring to people as _friends_ when they meant something quite different.

In one address, Harding had explained to them what their job would be. Hands behind his back, he had prowled before them, slightly bowed, and said, “There’s this misunderstanding we sometimes have with junior agents, where they think they work in intelligence. The fact is, broadly speaking, we know what’s happening in France; we don’t need you lot to tell us. We need you lot to help put a stop to it, see what I mean?”

He had looked reassuringly haggard that day—to Joan, at least. How could anyone stick smooth, young commanding officers? Harding’s creased face and hard frown, his battered handsomeness, made him look down to earth, believable. It was in that moment that Joan realised she had never heard him talk about Victory in any serious sense; oh, winning, certainly, but he was a man of small projects and gradual triumphs, not a devotee of grand patriotic dreams. The thought surprised her, but she didn’t have time to linger on it, or on how she liked him for it; kissing his teeth, straightening up, and frowning, he carried on talking.

“Attacks on railways, factories, telephone lines—aiding and abetting the Resistance—spreading of propaganda, rumours, general confusion—that’s our job. See? Confuse, distract, inconvenience, terrify if you have to. There are certain institutions in this country, ladies and gentlemen, whose duty it is to conduct information-gathering in occupied territories, and they’re prone to considering SOE a bloody nuisance.” He showed a slice of bright white teeth. “This is largely because we’re involved in projects which have a measurable impact on the war effort, while they aren’t. I trust you all to live up to their accusations, therefore, and make bigger bloody nuisances of yourselves than ever before. Right?”

But to a ripple of laughter and a few wry ‘right’s, he held up a large, rough hand, tone sobering.

“That’s not to say we don’t need details,” he said. “When you’re in France, don’t forget it’s not just you. And it’s not just your network. You’ll learn, ladies and gents, that it’s all in the detail. One of our boys was recently arrested for being a British agent after he went into a cafe and ordered _café noir_. Anyone know what his mistake was?”

Joan didn’t think the story was true; not with the way Harding’s jaw had clenched as he had spoken about Alain, the captured wireless operator. She couldn’t imagine that he would be so cavalier about an agent’s arrest as to use it as a cautionary tale.

Whatever the veracity of the tale, from beside her Sherlock said, “Milk ration.”

“Right,” Harding said. “There’s no such thing as ordering black coffee in France because no one’s ordered coffee with milk since the Germans took over, or thereabouts. That’s why I want detail from you. Leave the political machinations, the intrigue, the things you think will earn you a medal. Some of the most useful information smuggled out of France in the past few months has been about what shoes Parisian girls are wearing these days.”

There was a thoughtful, uneasy quiet, and Streetham muttered something. Joan didn’t hear what it was, but Sherlock’s head turned towards him with a cool, bird-of-prey movement, and Harding’s face turned faux-pleasant.

“What was that,” he said quietly, with Streetham fixed in his gaze.

Unwisely, Streetham didn’t opt for denial. Instead, he said, “I just—was saying I’d been wondering what SOE employed so many ladies for.”

Harding relaxed; laughed. Joan’s lips thinned, and she heard Sherlock exhale slowly, dragonishly, from her nose.

“Nah,” Harding said. “Thing is, Streetham, that Hooper’s so subtle I doubt many of you know her first name, and no one on this living earth has ever seen Donovan panic, and the only person in this room who’s a better shot than Watson is me, and Holmes—we don’t even know what Holmes is, but we are very bloody glad she’s not working for the Germans. See my point?” Streetham had gone pale, and Harding raised his eyebrows at him, tone genial and terrible, while Joan stared straight forwards, blinking, shocked. “That’s what we employ so many ladies for,” Harding finished. “Any further questions?”

Predictably, there hadn’t been.

Sherlock’s hand twitched in Joan’s grip, and Joan wondered, with a slow fondness, if she was asleep—and realised that Sherlock couldn’t have sat up to wait for Joan’s return without forgoing her reduced ration of sleeping pills. And before that, in London: she had slept without swallowing them.

She had opened her eyes—lashes scratching against the pillow—to stare harder into the dark, suddenly tense, alarmed. But Sherlock’s breathing was even, and her fingers didn’t twitch again; she had to be asleep. Joan was almost sure of it.

It was all the more reason not to pull her hand away. She hooked her fingers into the spaces between Sherlock’s, hoping she wouldn’t wake her: enjoying the fragile tenderness of hoping not to wake her. She closed her eyes again.

Cover: a hand held in the dark.

At Beaulieu—and in SOE, it seemed—cover was king. 

There was a curiously rankless woman named Mrs Beckett who gave seminars on disguise, acting, and explained such things as how the French used their cutlery and how people made eye contact when they had nothing to hide. She liked to impress upon them the importance of living their cover, an opinion echoed by Captain Levison and Wing Commander Young, both part-time instructors at the house: all experts in that prized quality. Cover wasn’t who you pretended to be; cover was who you became.

For Joan, it had been an exercise not in learning, but in hearing her own formless suspicions expressed with startling clarity—spelt out in a new language. But of course that was how cover worked. Whenever her fellow students expressed surprise and confusion at the idea—though most of them didn’t—she wondered if they had never kept a secret. Wondered how they had lived.

Never like this, certainly: never constructing their own lines of public and private, so that the whole room belonged to the public, open world, apart from this gap between her bed and Sherlock’s, which was private, theirs, even if Sherlock was asleep—especially if Sherlock was asleep, because Joan’s quiet, needful spark of hope that she wouldn’t wake her belonged to that space.

There were only nine students still on the course, Joan included. It hadn’t sweetened the atmosphere so much as intensified it. The women, in particular, stuck together, apart from the men, who—Sally had noted once—seemed to believe, contrary to mathematics, that they were outnumbered. Despite this division, classes at Beaulieu had turned more intimate, and in some cases much less formal; this depended on the character and preferences of whichever instructor was teaching at the time. Many of the instructors, like Mrs Beckett, held no military rank; some, it was rumoured, had been anything from criminals to actors in their lives before the war. Which Mrs Beckett had been—or still was—was a matter of much debate amongst the students, but it was impossible to guess. She was an ample-hipped, dark-skinned woman, with a fluid, thrilling voice and a rather sardonic style of instruction. Her title seemed not to come with any wedding ring, or indeed any husband; if a Mr Beckett existed, he hadn’t left any mark on her. Joan wasn’t sure she liked her; Sherlock, by her own admission, thought her ‘not entirely tedious’.

In one lesson, Mrs Beckett had moved onto the issue of teeth. Joan only really noticed the change of subject because there was a recoil of disgust all around the room when the announcement came that, “Of course, we’ll have to redo all your fillings.”

At their faces, Mrs Beckett raised her eyebrows at them and said, “Well, really! Don’t you know the French use gold?”

“What about crowns?” Joan asked, thinking of Sherlock and her patchwork canine—but not really minding the answer. The answer wasn’t the point. She just wanted to transmit some signal to Sherlock, across the room and through the air, crowded as it was by other people’s personalities: hullo. Or not quite that, even: it was more like naming Sherlock’s callsign on air, like she had been taught to in her radio classes.

It was only because of that thought that Joan caught how Sherlock looked to her and how her lashes flickered to a rhythm: dah-dah-dit, a break, and dah-dah.

Joan blinked—unencoded—and sat back slightly; almost didn’t hear Mrs Beckett replying, “Porcelain, usually.” Sherlock’s stare was cool, grey, impenetrable, her face completely without expression. She didn’t look at all as if she had just blinked the Morse for _good morning_ at Joan.

But if Joan had doubted it for a second, Sherlock’s next few blinks removed that possibility: dah-dit-dah, for _over_ or (and Joan knew it was the latter meaning Sherlock was trying to pass on, rather pointedly—) _go_.

Right. Well then. Joan licked her lips and returned Sherlock’s _good morning_ in order to play for time, then: _hw r u_ , blinked out steadily. But before she could even dah-dit-dah to signal the end of the message, Sherlock had glanced impatiently up to the ceiling and back again, and her eyelashes had started to flutter as if she were forcing back tears or trying to get some irritant out of her eye.

Joan shook her head, smiling, and ceased to try following. Too fast, and too complex. Not for the first time, she wondered what it would be like to see Sherlock actually transmitting; so far, the Morse classes hadn’t included Sherlock or any of the other students, like Sally, who were already proficient in wireless transmission and Morse code. 

Still clasping Sherlock’s hand in the dark, Joan could picture how the tendons in Sherlock’s wrist would quiver and tighten as she worked the key, and how her eyes would go blank, oracular, staring beyond the cardboard theatricality of the world around her; unless, that was, she closed them as she transmitted, lashes trembling against her cheeks to the rhythm of dits and dahs.

Joan wouldn’t ever know which she did; Joan wouldn’t see it; Joan would be miles away.

The thought sank in slowly, cooling off the fantasy, and making Joan open her eyes again, though still there was nothing but darkness. She couldn’t even make out the outline of Sherlock’s curls. The blackout curtains barricaded all moonlight from the room. There was only the pressing dark, and the racket of other people’s breathing.

So this was a goodbye, was it? Hands clutched in the dark and a concerto of sighs buffeting the air, whistling, snoring. And in the gap between their narrow white beds, a silent last hurrah.

* * *

But Joan slept, and deeply, with no dreams she could remember; so deeply, in fact, that it wasn’t until the shouting started that she could pry herself from sleep’s grip, blinking on her sun-washed pillow, her eyes stinging and her head hurting and her hand still hanging off the side of her bed, but now empty.

Where was she? Sunlight—and army starch—Swordland? No. That hotel with—? No. And the shouting! The noise was tremendous. Joan groaned and screwed up her eyes and tried to press her face into her pillow, the noise wavering, filtering in through sleep, grating on Joan’s ears. Slowly, it began to resolve into words, just as the room resolved about her. Of course, she was in Beaulieu in the New Forest, and the words were:

“—unbelievable!”

The words were Sally’s; she sounded disgusted.

Joan sat up.

The tableau before her didn’t make sense, and unlike the room, and Sally’s words, didn’t become any more comprehensible after Joan blinked, her eyelids feeling sore and scratchy—but it was familiar. It was like the scene in Wanborough.

There was Sally, snapping; there was Sherlock, snapping back; and there was a case open on a bed, being methodically filled, but it wasn’t Sherlock’s case—it was Molly’s, and Molly was before it in her service dress, staring down into its depths as she folded her pajamas and tucked them away. She looked very calm, very pallid; there was a clamminess to her cheeks which made Joan blink and look for pink lids, matted eyelashes, but nothing about Molly’s face otherwise suggested tears, and she wasn’t shaking.

“What,” said Joan, to announce that she was conscious, scrubbing at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “What is going on.”

Sherlock was lounging by the door in her WAAF blouse and skirt, arms folded across her chest and cigarette in hand. She pinned Joan to the pillow with a cool grey stare, and said, “No.”

“No?”

“It’s only six, go back to sleep. Harding left special notice that you should be left to lie in.”

“Harding,” Joan said, voice croaky with too little sleep, “can go to hell if he thinks I’m accepting special treatment. What’s going on? Molly?”

Molly opened her mouth, but it was Sherlock who said, “Molly’s leaving,” and Sally who tossed her head and folded her arms and snapped, “Because Holmes put her up to it.”

“Because I want to go,” Molly said abruptly, her eyes blinking over and over; and Joan saw a flash of angry pain cross Sally’s features before she could marshal them back into order, shaking her head and pressing her lips together. For a moment, all Joan could think was that Sally and Molly were close; not Sherlock-and-Joan close, but—

—leaving? It hit her suddenly, breaking through the last webs of sleep, incomprehensible: “ _Leaving_?”

“Yes,” said Molly, her voice tight and quiet. “Leaving.” She paused, in the process of patting down her folded clothes, making more room in her suitcase, and looked up, some of her calm melting a little as she pushed her brown hair back from her pointed, pallid, earnest features and frowned in Joan’s direction. “I was going to wake you,” she said to her, urgent and apologetic, her brow crumpled. “I promise, I wouldn’t have gone otherwise, I’m just—not quite ready to go yet. Ten minutes.”

Joan was stumbling out of bed, pushing back sheets and trying to get her thoughts straight and her words out from her throat, where they seemed to be stuck: “Right, but—why—”

Sally let out a barking, breathless laugh, mouth turned down. “Because Holmes has been—”

“Molly _wants to go_ , Donovan,” Sherlock said, addressing her cigarette and not Sally at all; one of her hands gripping the inside of her own elbow, the other extended in front of her so she could gaze at the accumulating ashes. Joan blinked, over and over.

“No,” she said, blankly, almost laughing, while Sally said, “So you’re just going to deny it? —Molly, come on.”

“ _All_ of you,” Molly said suddenly, slamming her suitcase closed and spreading out her hands atop it, staring at them each in turn with her big hazel eyes clear and strained. There was a real upset to her voice, a strangled, beseeching note which stopped them all, even Sherlock. “All of you, please, I’m just—going.”

“Where?” Joan finally thought to stay, still feeling like she had been knocked off-balance. Molly, go? It was ridiculous. She was slight, and shy, but part of—of _this_ , of all of Joan’s experience of SOE; a quiet, steady presence through it all. And not two weeks ago she had been joking about it: Shoddily-Organised Espionage...

Joan actually felt a little sick—not with Molly, no, but with shock. She struggled to keep her back straight, though, and her face at least reasonable. Molly said, “Forgery section.”

“Ask Holmes how she got that idea,” Sally interjected.

“ _Sally_ ,” said Molly; “ _Molly_ ,” said Joan; and Sherlock just remained impassive, watching smoke curl from her cigarette.

Sally said, “Well, it’s true,” in a voice which might have been fuller than Joan had ever heard coming from her, tight with emotion. Sally’s hands were in fists at her sides. Her words were angry but her tone was horrified. “Isn’t it? —Molly, look—” Joan’s stomach clenched with deep, guttural unease at how private Sally sounded, her voice dropping urgently as she spoke. She wanted, abruptly, to be out of the room, leaving Molly and Sally to it.

She looked to Sherlock, but Sherlock just looked faintly disdainful, her cigarette in her mouth and her eyes fixed on something which apparently existed on another plane. “Sherlock,” Joan said quietly, uncomfortably, thinking of something Sherlock had said, on their last night in London: _Molly’s not going to be posted as a W/T, if she’s posted at all…_

“I still don’t know why you’re out of bed,” was all that Sherlock drawled, raising one eyebrow and releasing a few ribbons of smoke from her mouth as she spoke. “You don’t have to be.”

“Sherlock!”

“I’m going,” said Molly, very softly, stilling the whole room.

Oh, God, Joan realised, with a nauseated jolt: so here it was, the first of her active service goodbyes—stilted, unpleasant, public. Molly was looking between them all. “Okay,” Joan said, mostly to herself, realising what was demanded by the occasion. Molly came to her first, in a sudden, certain, impulsive movement, and wrapped her arms around her, uncomfortably tight.

Her hair smelt of strawberries. “Black market shampoo?” Joan said, instead of _goodbye_ or another similar , and Molly went the _colour_ of strawberries as she pulled away a little, but Joan just said, “No, it’s—I mean. Very nice. Bye. Good luck.” It didn’t sound sincere; it didn’t feel sincere when Joan said it. She didn’t believe anything that was coming out of her mouth; she didn’t believe the situation.

Molly’s mouth quavered into almost a smile. Joan blinked over and over, unable to believe that they were running out of seconds. It was too quick, too fast; she wasn’t close to Molly but Molly was close to this, and this wasn’t meant to end—yet. “ _You’re_ wishing _me_ good luck?” Molly said.

“Yeah,” Joan said. “I heard the forgery section is full of criminals.”

Molly gave a damp little laugh and finally stepped back properly. “Keep in touch,” she insisted. “When you’re back.” Then she turned towards Sherlock and Joan saw her throat bob as she swallowed.

“Um,” she said.

“London,” said Sherlock, her eyes fixed on the ceiling and her cigarette waving as she spoke.

“What?”

Sherlock plucked her cigarette from her mouth and ashed it impatiently, rolling smoke out of her mouth as she pinned Molly with her grey stare: “You’ll be working in London. I’ll see you there. Before I go out.”

Molly’s mouth was working, as if she were struggling to push out words, her face flickering; for a terrible moment Joan thought she could see tears gleaming in her eyes, her cheeks mottled pink and her hands fussing in thin air, clenching uneasily by her sides. “Are you sure?” Molly asked, voice unconvincingly bright, hopeful.

“Obviously,” Sherlock said with a roll of her eyes, and Joan said, “Sher—”

But Molly had come to her own defence, with a snapped: “Don’t be horrible.” Her words were thick with something like dammed-up tears, making her voice nasal, cracked. Joan looked on in horror.

Sherlock looked at her for a few moments as if uncomprehending, then crossed the space between them in two long strides, held her cigarette away, and kissed her cheek. It was a hard movement—like she were sticking a pin into her—but Molly screwed her eyes closed and raised her hand as if about to touch Sherlock’s arm, though she didn’t quite get there; her fingers hovered in the space between their bodies, never reached her.

Sherlock pulled back. She was frowning, her lips turned down. “Don’t be late on your first day, Molly,” she said, her words cool but her tone quiet, and Molly swallowed hard.

“Fine. Yes. Good luck to you too,” she said, very softly, and turned away. “Sally—”

“I’ll walk you down,” Sally said, and grabbed Molly’s case; insisted on holding the door for her. Neither of them looked around as it swung closed behind them.

Joan and Sherlock stood in the silence; the whole room stock still save for the slow unwinding of smoke from the end of Sherlock’s cigarette.

“Did you?” Joan said.

“Did I what?”

“ _Sherlock_.” At this remonstrance, Sherlock scoffed and strode away to the dresser, where an ashtray was balanced. She pulled her battered cigarette packet from her pocket, pulling out another of the long, white cigarettes she favoured—slimmer and lengthier than the service cigarettes, and the tobacco never fell out of them. Joan licked her lips, breathing evenly. “You told me,” she said slowly, “you said Molly wouldn’t be posted as a W/T, if she was posted to France at all.”

Sherlock was lighting her new cigarette from the smouldering end of the old one, breathing once, twice, three times, the end glowing as she filled her lungs— “Oh,” she said, sighing out smoke, “yes, you’re quite correct, I came to a conclusion which turned out to be right. What a surprise.”

Her tone was as good as a confirmation, and Joan sucked in her breath, stiffening, pushing her shoulders back. “Why. _Why_ did you—?”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“ _Look_ at me.”

Sherlock huffed out an irritated breath, turning her head in one of those bird-of-prey cranes of the neck, her lips open and her eyes cold while she put one hand on her hip and braced the other against the chest of drawers. “If I gave you my word?” she inquired, staring down Joan with vicious grey eyes.

Joan opened her mouth, then closed it again. Set her jaw. Sherlock was still glaring at her.

“I would hope,” Joan said, “that would,” _be something I could hold onto_ , “mean something.”

Sherlock stared at her for a few more inscrutable seconds, and then gave a rippling sigh, “Ugh,” and dropped her hand from her hip, raising her cigarette to her lips, straightening. She let smoke roll from her lips as she said, “It doesn’t matter. Yes, I suggested she request work in the Forgery Section. Her sketches are impressive. You haven’t seen them.”

“Jesus,” Joan muttered. “No, I haven’t seen them. But why do you think you’ve got the right to—”

“Do you think she would have survived, Joan?” Sherlock was cupping her elbow in one hand, cigarette perched between the fingers of the other; she looked narrow and elegant, cool. Joan pushed her lips together and her shoulders back, and Sherlock continued: “And I’m not being metaphorical. I don’t mean—”

“I know what you meant.”

“Well.”

“I don’t know,” Joan said, “I don’t know why you think you can take that risk, or I can, or Sally can, but it’s your job to step in with Molly.”

“I only encouraged her to reach a conclusion she was already on the verge of arriving at.”

Joan raised her hand, scrubbed her fingers through her hair, still feeling unaccountably sick. There was something jarring about how wrong all this was; how none of it was meant to go this way. She breathed in deeply and reminded herself that there was no script; there was never a script; and she should have known better.

“Then you should have let her arrive at it,” she said. Of course, she should have known better; better than to imagine that she and Sherlock would be posted together; to think that France might be anything like training, with the same faces, the same people; to think that she could take anything with her when she stepped from that black Westland Lysander into thin air. She couldn’t. Nothing. Not Sherlock, not what she—felt for her—oh, damn it, was now the time to shy from her own thoughts? Yes, she felt something for her, a lot for her, and what a lot of bloody good it would do her in France.

“And if it was too late?” Sherlock asked. Joan barely heard her.

Why had Molly hugged her? They hadn’t been close. The thought twitched in the back of her brain, made everything else she was keeping back tumble out of its place. Occupied France, Vichy France...

“Just—”

“Yes?”

“Sherlock, I—we’ll come back to, it, we—I’m not done with this.”

“What?”

“I’ve got to tell you something,” Joan said, taking her hand away from where she had been scrunching her fingers in her sleep-mussed hair. Before she could stop herself she carried on, voice mechanical and rattling in her throat, sleep-hoarse; “We’re not being posted to the same network.”

Sherlock, who had been in the middle of raising her cigarette up to her lips, wavered for a moment; her hand froze, her lashes flickered, eyes focusing suddenly on something closer, but still invisible to Joan.

“Well,” she said, after just a moment, lowering her smoking hand. Her blouse sleeves were rolled up; a curl of smoke drifted up past her wrist. Joan felt a sudden stab of anger, a sudden aching tightness of the chest, that the inside of Sherlock’s wrist should be so translucent and that she should be on her way to France without Joan ever having pressed her mouth there.

But all she said was, “Well,” back.

“I suppose,” Sherlock’s voice was slow, like humid, storm-threatening weather, her eyes distant, “we agreed anyway—”

“I thought of that too,” Joan said. “First, I mean. But it didn’t actually—help.”

Finally, Sherlock’s gaze drifted back to her. A long column of grey ash was building at the end of her cigarette. “This is ridiculous,” she said suddenly. “I’ll tell Harding—”

“You can’t do that.”

“I’ll—”

“Sherlock,” Joan beseeched. “That’s not going to work, and I don’t want you to…”

“To what? Make a fool of myself?” The ash from her cigarette dropped to the floor as she stepped forwards, looming in front of Joan with her shoulders squared. “Act spoilt? He hired me. Sought me out. The least he can do is make sure I’ve appropriate assistance.”

Joan grabbed her tie, because Sherlock was close enough, and said, “Don’t you dare,” yanking her closer. She wasn’t sure whether she was threatening her or just—trying to have her _near_ , maybe. “I won’t ask for special treatment.”

Sherlock’s hand was on Joan’s wrist, gripping tight, cigarette smouldering between them and the smoke stinging Joan’s eyes. It made the whole room look grey and greasy, polluting the morning sunlight. “ _I_ will,” Sherlock said, in the tones of a threat.

“Jesus,” Joan said. “I want to be with you, Sherlock,” and there, she had said it, disguised as something else, disguised as something which was only part of an argument as opposed to a whole world which couldn’t be lived in, “but this is—there’s a war on. _Don’t_ do that.” She snapped the last because Sherlock had rolled her eyes with exaggerated disbelief. “ _Don’t_.”

“I suppose you want to _stand firm_ ,” Sherlock sneered, “ _carry on_ , with all your _courage_ and your _cheerfulness_ and your _resolution_ —”

“Don’t. Do that.”

“—must be blissfully easy to be so blindly patriotic, but—”

“Sherlock,” Joan said. “Stop. Stop talking like you were forced into signing up. Stop talking like you didn’t choose this. Stop talking like you couldn’t have run away from this somehow with all of that money you have, or, hell, I don’t know, gone to crack codes or done something clever somewhere behind a desk. Stop acting like you’re better than us just because you never wanted to be in the military. Stop acting like you’re not in the military because you don’t want to be in the military.”

Sherlock was staring at her, her mouth open, her cheeks pallid. Her lips quivered a moment, as if she were thinking of things she could say, but then stilled; she stayed silent. She hadn’t relinquished her grip on Joan’s wrist; Joan hadn’t let go of her tie.

Every time Sherlock breathed out, Joan could feel warm air against her face.

“It wasn’t my first choice, either,” Joan said, the words difficult to say. “But it turned out alright—turned out better for me than it did for you. Fine. That’s fine. Being military works for me. And for you it’s a means to an end. And that’s fine too, except I want you to _get_ to that bloody end, _God_ help me, so just—please. For me. Keep a lid on it. And after we come back from France—”

Breathing. They were both breathing, trembling, their pulses jumping; staring at each other, living now in a world where that sentence had passed between them.

Joan was horrified she had said it like that, relieved she had said it at all. “After we come back from France,” Sherlock said, her tone unreadable.

“If,” Joan said, “if you want—”

“What _happens_ after we come back from France, what are you actually _suggesting_ —” gripping hard at Joan’s wrist, _shaking_ her where she held her—

“I don’t know,” Joan said. “We could—you said you wanted to live in London.”

Sherlock was blinking rapidly, cigarette smoke unravelling in the air between them. “Yes,” she said. 

Sherlock’s cigarette had been neglected too long, a precarious column of ash trembling at the end of it—until it crumbled, at just that moment, onto Joan’s wrist. She gasped, releasing Sherlock’s tie and snatching her hand back. Sherlock jumped, swiftly flicking the ash from her cigarette and pushing it into her mouth, “ _Ugh_ ,” and turning away with a frustrated look on her face, apparently deeming the moment shattered—

Joan stepped forwards, seized her by the shoulders, made her shop.

“Don’t,” she said. Wrist smarting, heart thundering. Under her hands Sherlock’s shoulders were bony, warm, hard. “Just—do what you have to do and come home, like everyone else.”

“Joan…”

“Look, can I, can I kiss you? We’ve got about thirty seconds before someone knocks on the door—”

“Yes,” said Sherlock, “obviously yes,” and then a second later, against Joan’s mouth, “I won’t apologise for—with Molly—”

And Joan was gasping— “shut up, shut up—shut _up_ ” —begging against her mouth, trying to make every movement into a memory; impossible, though, to feel and to store and to hold on to the seconds as they passed from a whole promising thirty into twenty, and ten, and then nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Next chapter will arrive on the 4th November, oh my. Incidentally, since we're on alternate-week posting, I think I'll be doing previews on all non-posting Mondays over on tumblr (my url is the same as my AO3 username). No obligation to follow if you don't fancy it; everything is under the tag 'no bangs without foreign office approval'. So hopefully that will be a kind of compromise. (I really miss updating weekly, but am fairly sure I would implode if I tried to do so currently).
> 
> EDIT: _and_ , wow, I'm an ungrateful madam; all credit and thanks to [Interrosand](http://interrosand.tumblr.com/) for reassuring me about my French!
> 
>  **"Beaulieu"** \- Beaulieu is [super pretty](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Beaulieu_Palace_House3.JPG) and, these days, houses a museum about SOE (and also a transport museum, but we all know where my interests lie). _Tragically_ , it is a day trip away from where I used to live. If only.
> 
>  **"tradecraft"** \- ahaha WELL THIS IS COMPLETELY HISTORICALLY INACCURATE but it's a literary allusion, so I get away with it. /bangs gavel! John Le Carré (who wrote Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and many other fine, fine books— _so_ recommended—and who was, in his day, an actual fax spy) coined this term in his writing. It later got co-opted by spies who were, you know, just hanging out, being spies, and is today still in use. This was well after WW2, where I guess the term would more likely be spycraft, or something similar, but I am so enamoured of the whole thing (and so indebted to Le Carré for inspiration for this thing) that I had to put it in. Also owed to him (and other spy writers, but he does it in my favourite way) is the notion of _being_ your cover rather than lying to sustain it.
> 
>  **"stand firm...with your courage...cheerfulness...resolution"** \- Sherlock is quoting a failed propaganda campaign which urged Brits to, well, see above. Interestingly, these slogans were from the same series as 'KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON', and were so unpopular that 'KEEP CALM' never actually saw the light of day during WW2. What's taken now as sort of jocularly British was, at the time, received by the average person as bloody patronising. Fairly understandably.


	16. Sweat, Tea, Bathwater.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am going to offer a **warning** : this chapter contains scenes of and discussion of attempted suicide.

**LONDON  
AUGUST 1942**

The safe flat was a box of heat on a dirty, exhausted road. From three storeys up, the smeared glass of the window looked out onto tarmac and broken brickwork, and it was Lilian’s habit, in the first few days, to note with irritation, “Doesn’t make you feel that safe, does it,” the view being mostly old rubble. She had grown out of the habit, however—which was lucky, because it had always made irritation start to whine at the base of Sherlock’s skull, and Joan had had to catch her eye and ease her down from the heights of her annoyance with just her eyebrows. With the advent of the full moon, Lilian had even stopped looking out so much.

Sherlock didn’t mind the view. Across the street the buildings had been hit, and only the road had been cleared—still she liked it, for the way in which nobody stopped to stare, and simply worked around the absence. The ruined bricks. The _bombsite_ , to be prosaic about it. It had to be over a year old. People had adjusted.

Inside the flat, there was no such activity. The air was still, and seemed to sweat; a calendar hung lopsided on the kitchen wall, with each full moon marked off in red. (The 26th of August; the 24th of September). It was one of the many sad little notes which seemed to haunt the place—like the typed notice taped above the black plastic ’phone in the hall, warning _conversations on telephone are not private!_ or the piece of paper on the inside of the door anxiously beseeching them to _please leave the rooms as found_.

But the full moon was the most important thing, of course. The full moon was when matte black Westland Lysanders flew out to France; the full moon was when people were collected from the safe flat, brought to another building to prepare, and finally brought to an airfield and a waiting plane. Perhaps. Or they could be left waiting until the next month, the next full moon period, with no warning whatsoever.

Lilian had said, “I feel like a werewolf,” and Joan had laughed politely, then not caught Sherlock’s eye.

There were four of them in the flat; Sherlock, Joan, Colette and Lilian. Molly was gone. She was settling in well in Artefacts, Harding informed them when pressed—‘Artefacts’ being the polite name for the forgery section. Sally, too, was gone, but her absence was temporary; she was on a specialised W/T course for a month.

Sherlock had been meant to go with her. In fact, for three days, she had. Preparing to be rattled off in an ancient train, she had felt so much—and so untidily, so unpronounceably—that it wouldn’t get past a blockage in her throat, and she could only sweat and snap and smoke; couldn’t say anything to Joan at all. On the platform her hand had shaken so badly it had taken three tries to light her cigarette.

At the W/T course they had hunched over wireless sets and transmitted Three Blind Mice over and over until Sherlock’s jaw ached with clenching and the words repeated themselves over and over in her mind. _Did you ever see such a sight in your life_. Sherlock startled the instructors with her speed. When questioned, she explained: “Because I’m a violinist, and because I’m not _vacant_.”

Three days later she had been sent back and, not knowing what else to do, had simply waited in the living room of the safe flat until Joan came in—and she stopped dead, staring at her. Sherlock had said: “The instructors and I came to an agreement.”

“They got sick of you and you got sick of them, you mean,” Joan replied.

“Well, yes,” said Sherlock.

And then later in their room, where they were blessedly, almost frighteningly alone, with Sherlock on her knees and her face pressed into Joan’s neck, with Joan’s fingers inside her, making her twist, buck, groan, and wetness was smeared all along Joan’s chin already and the insides of Sherlock’s thighs, too, Joan had tried to talk—a damned mistake. “Another, I can, another,” Sherlock had heard herself chant while Joan groaned, “I thought I wasn’t going to get to,” “Don’t, shut up, don’t, give me,” “say goodbye,” “we aren’t, oh, _oh_ ,” “you said you wanted,” “ _more_ ,” and their words were garbled, kiss-ugly, all spit and bitten lips and trying to stay quiet.

But anyway; anyway; anyway, there were things other than goodbyes to think of.

Colette and Lilian were new to them, prior occupants of the safe flat who were also waiting for the call. Joan either thought it worth her while to try and get to know them, or was trying to appease some sense of good manners by making conversation. Sherlock suspected the latter. It was all very British: _rubbing along in a bad situation_ , just as if they had been crouched in a public shelter together, roaring trivialities over the sound of bombs and sirens.

Joan had told them Molly’s Shoddily-Organised Espionage joke. They both appreciated it, Colette most of all. While the laughter bubbled up—urgently, seeking to fend off silence and everything it might contain—Sherlock had looked away, and hadn’t so much thought of Molly as felt a strange, greasy mix of unease and defiance seep into her, as if her brain were porous, open to absorb any notion which might pollute the air around her.

It wasn’t guilt; just a kind of powerlessness in having done her best, and being forced to let that lie. 

But around her, all three of them—Joan, Colette and Lilian—laughed at Molly’s joke in her absence, even though Sherlock wished they’d _shut up_. 

Colette wasn’t so terrible; was small, dark, French by birth, Scottish by her mother’s remarriage; she had been on a mission to France before, and was waiting to be picked up for her second, which earned her a sort of quiet prestige which Sherlock tried to ignore. She spoke English with a curious mix of Gallic intonation and Scottish vocabulary. Joan liked hearing her offer a _wee dram_ of the damson gin she’d gotten off a friend, not least because the damson gin was more than acceptable. Sherlock liked to watch the steady, dark calm which had taken up residence in Joan’s expression lift from her eyes, even if only for a few minutes.

Lilian, conversely, was slender, almost consumptively pale, and always talking—not for the sake of getting a response but seemingly simply to have something to do. Like Joan and Sherlock she was waiting for her first posting, and had been waiting for almost two months now. Two months in this sweltering limbo. Two months of breathless waiting. Two months of reading the notices on the walls. Sherlock wasn’t surprised that Lilian talked all the time, so urgently and so absently, but neither was she inclined to be charitable. Lilian was annoying.

They were all prepared, of course, all briefed; they had all had their their hair cut, their dental work done; they had all had their cover stories assigned. Sherlock rehearsed hers carelessly: Victoire Renaud, code name Reine, callsign Knight. A couple of syllables meant to hold off a force which most of Europe had fallen to. They clicked through her mind with all the dry clatter of tickertape pouring out in paper ribbons: _Victoire Renaud—Reine—Knight_.

Victoire was twenty four years old, with an ailing aunt in Paris. Victoire was unmarried but unwilling to be considered a spinster. Victoire was too harsh, and too harshly made-up when she could get her hands on enough powder and paint. When she couldn’t get make-up, she used beetroot juice and talc, and told herself it was good enough. A cautionary tale of a woman on the outside at least, she had nonetheless a kind of solid practicality and innate good sense which steered her right; a compass, not moral, but pragmatic, which never failed to give her a direction in which to strive. She wasn’t stupid; wasn’t clever, but wasn’t stupid.

Sherlock didn’t like her, but that was very well; the trouble with liking people—and she thought about watching Joan in the mornings as she dozed, her hair a smear of gold across her cheek—was that you got _involved_. Victoire was small enough, mean enough, to be put away when Sherlock had no need of her.

There was some need to practice, thoough. The real challenges were mere practicalities—acclimatising herself to styling Victoire’s fluffy halo of curls, to pinching her cheeks to rouge them, to pouring her own perfect French into the mold of Victoire’s affected drawl. And stockings, of course, were in France a matter of urgent concern, just as they were in Britain; which was why Sherlock was standing before the full-length mirror in the bedroom she shared with Joan, with her skirt held up about her hips and a saucepan full of cooling black tea resting on the dressing table—a paintbrush in hand, her legs stained a weak tan colour.

She had one bare foot—toes still pale and unstained—planted on the wooden flat of the table, beside the pan; was judging the tone of her inner thigh with cool, pursed lips. She thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Victoire had more detailed opinions on the matter.

With a noisy creak, the door opened.

“Preparation,” Sherlock answered, a split second before Joan said, “ _What_ are you—right.”

Sherlock took her foot off the dressing table, put down the paintbrush, and turned towards Joan as she came in, shutting the door behind her. The room was blue-tinged, full of light, airy; featuring two narrow beds, one military neat and one unmade. “Faking stockings?” Joan asked, wandering closer—as if it were merely by chance that she was drawing closer to Sherlock.

“Not for me,” Sherlock said, eyebrows up, letting go of her skirt to let it drop heavily into place about her knees, covering the uneven brushstrokes at the tops of her thighs. Joan grabbed her hip, as if trying to keep her skirt up—the movement was so quick, urgent—but she was a second too late, if that had been her aim at all, and Sherlock felt her grip through the rough bite of tweed.

They looked at each other for a few moments, before Joan said, “It’s the full moon.”

“Don’t let’s tell that stupid werewolf joke,” Sherlock murmured. The bitter scent of tea made the air biting, fresh. Joan smiled, a quick slice of teeth which made Sherlock’s throat arid, scratchy, convulsive.

“No,” Joan said, loosening her grip on Sherlock’s hip, slowly, fingers trailing away. “No, it’s just—” just that agents were always sent off on full moons to give pilots enough visibility to cut through the dark with no lights on; just that there was never any warning; just that in hours, either or both of them could be picked up “—you’ve not got any seams.”

Sherlock hid her confusion by staring hard at Joan and her bright blue eyes—like blackout lamps, _God_ —until finally it clicked, of course, that Joan was talking about her painted-on stockings, still damp. “Well, no,” Sherlock agreed, toes curling against the floorboards. “I was interrupted.”

“Want some help?” Joan asked. Wordlessly, Sherlock reached behind herself to the dressing table, picked up an eyeliner pencil from beside the saucepan full of tea, and offered it to Joan. Joan took the pencil with a smile, no words, and turned Sherlock to face the mirror once more, crouching down behind her.

“I suppose you’ve steady hands?” Sherlock asked, pulling her skirt up again; lifting her head and catching Victoire staring back at her with open, beetroot-stained lips and hard grey eyes. It was a gut-shock, cold and sudden. Ringed by Victoire’s eyeliner, Sherlock saw that her own pupils were moon-huge.

Joan said, “Very,” and the breath of the word tickled the back of Sherlock’s thigh, playing cold over damp skin, raising fine hairs.

Sherlock’s fingers tightened in the bunched folds of her dark skirt. “Try to remember,” she warned, “that seams don’t stay straight. They move out to the sides.”

“Yes,” Joan said, laughing, her breath a bluster of air against the back of Sherlock’s thigh. Sherlock and Victoire shared a look in the mirror. “I have worn silk stockings myself, you know. Don’t tell the papers.”

“Don’t smudge the tea.”

“Deal. So if I—” 

It was the noise, more than anything, that made Sherlock’s eyes widen, her lips part; the obscene kiss-smack of Joan’s lips against the back of her thigh, right above where she had stopped painting, where the natural pallor of her skin shone clammy and white. 

Joan lingered. For a moment Sherlock’s senses burned white-hot and the world whined in her ears and her eyes got even wider—then Joan pulled away, and more gentle, more muted, murmured, “So that’s fine?” 

Her voice vibrated against Sherlock’s skin. Sherlock cleared her throat, but Joan didn’t wait for Sherlock to answer before she started mouthing at the same spot, sucking—wet, soft.

“No marks,” Sherlock said abruptly, voice rough and catching and Joan _hmm_ ed her assent, mouth breaking from Sherlock’s skin. Sherlock felt her breath flutter against her. She stared into the grey rings of her own, half-unrecognisable eyes, and then finally allowed herself to look down, down, down the reflection in the mirror, past her hitched-up skirt and her expensive white knickers, non-regulation; at where Joan was on her knees behind her. They stayed quiet. _No marks_ because there might be a final medical exam before getting on the plane, if indeed either of them were to going to get on a plane tonight.

The thought quivered in the air, a plucked violin string which took too long to still.

“But,” Sherlock added, voice growing stronger to drown it out, mouth curving, a determined arrogance rippling merrily in her tone, “like I said, just _don’t smudge the tea_ ,” and Joan growled, caught the fleshiest part of Sherlock’s thigh between her teeth, make Sherlock’s breath catch, “Ah! _Ha_ —” 

She started by gasping and ended by snickering, not false; giddy colour rose to her cheeks, and from behind her she heard, _felt_ , Joan’s muffled laughter. Her heart swooped upwards, chest filling with light; not the last time, this. Couldn’t be. (Superstition).

“Are you distracted?” she inquired, voice ragged but wilfully mocking, her upper lip hitched up. “I _believe_ you’re meant to be doing my seams.”

“Just can’t get the help these days, can you?”

“No. No, it’s terrible. Mind you, here you are, a respectable corporal in the ATS, moonlighting as a lady’s maid—”

“A lady’s maid. _Tell_ me you’ve never actually had—”

“Not to help me get dressed, Joan, no.”

“So other sorts—?”

“At the House, before Mycroft dismissed most of them, yes. Trying to weaponise that pencil, are you?”

“Trying to get a decent line. Hold still.” Joan’s hands were, as promised, steady, but she had received more military training than medical and it showed; she pushed the point hard into Sherlock’s skin as she drew the pencil slowly downwards, always—Sherlock noted, with faint satisfaction—keeping slightly to the outside.

“Be careful.”

“What’ll you do, turn me into the streets with no reference?” Joan’s voice was coarse, purring, and she tilted her chin up as she spoke, leaning so that she was looking out from behind Sherlock’s hip, face visible in the mirror—lips curved in a wicked smirk.

“No,” Sherlock drawled, looking away from the mirror and down, over her own shoulder, to catch Joan’s eyes properly—watching herself, anyway, was too much like watching Victoire—and raising one eyebrow. “You have a fevered imagination. And you’d make a terrible domestic.”

“Better than you.”

“That wasn’t part of the discussion.”

“I think I’d do alright for you, at least.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I think I could keep you in line.”

“That isn’t what maids are for.”

“Sure about that?” Joan murmured into Sherlock’s flank, looking up at her with her gas-blue eyes lamplike and wide, innocent, her mouth against Sherlock’s skin and smiling; her voice casual, dangerous. A lock of sandy hair had fallen across her forehead. She looked as if she’d stepped off a propaganda poster, cut her hair short and decided to have some fun instead of looking out in the blackout. Sherlock’s lips parted. “Eyes on the mirror,” Joan said, and Sherlock thrilled to it, looking around and meeting, again, her own grey stare.

“So how do you suggest,” Sherlock said, as the point of the pencil sank again into the soft flesh of the back of her thigh, starting—there could be _no_ need for that—at the sensitive spot just below the curve of her backside, “that you could keep me in line?” She was grinning, or something like it—conscious of her breathing, her lips pulled away from her teeth.

Joan chuckled, and Sherlock’s bare toes curled against the floor. She drew the pencil down, slowly. “I think you’re already there.”

“Really—”

“Really,” Joan purred, dragging the pencil suddenly down the back of Sherlock’s knee, making her jump, grin, heart thumping in her chest—but catching Victoire’s eyes, Victoire’s mouth, red and open, grinning back at her. It was easier to see Victoire there, but fascinating to see herself bleed through; so that it was her, not Victoire, who was holding her skirt up about her hips, a triangle of silk disappearing between her legs—with the faint, trace curlicues of dark hair trapped beneath, spirals just discernible under the fabric. “Hold still.”

Sherlock murmured, “Yes,” for the pleasure of feeling Joan go still herself, pencil paused half-way down the back of Sherlock’s calf. She heard the click of Joan’s throat as she swallowed wetly. “Didn’t you hear me?” Sherlock needled, her own voice a low thrum in her throat.

“I heard you,” said Joan, and her voice had _dropped_ ; not deep, but quiet, rough, catching, and going straight through Sherlock; flaring excitement, satisfaction— _she had caused that_.

Slowly, Joan stopped the pencil, just above Sherlock’s ankle. “Well,” Sherlock said, and Joan interrupted with, “Put your foot up on the dressing table, like you were when I came in.”

Sherlock swallowed hard—in the mirror, Victoire’s bruise-red lips (like she’d just been smacked, like she’d bitten them raw—) squirmed, tried to express a thick, hot mix of arousal and embarrassment and amusement—she raised her foot, planted it on the dressing table; shook out her skirt a little but kept it up about her hips. Her face she kept turned to one side. There was a building heat between her legs. 

“Good,” Joan said, and Sherlock shut her eyes tight. Would Victoire Renaud get into a situation like—? No; Victoire Renaud liked men— “ _Perfect_ , Sherlock” —probably. She probably liked men. Joan was carrying on the pencil-line, down along the back of Sherlock’s ankle, right to her heel. Sherlock was breathing a little too quickly—in, and out—hot little breaths which were loud in her own ears. “Sherlock.”

“Mm.”

“This alright?”

“Yes.” Not the last time, this. As absurd as this was—they weren’t even doing anything, Joan was just drawing seams on the backs of Sherlock’s legs—it couldn’t be the last time. But then, Sherlock supposed uneasily—what would she do if it were the last time? Would she do something different? Push the beds together like she had in the hotel, pull Joan down onto it; look into her eyes as she took her? Would that be—more meaningful, better? More like a—?

— _no_ ; she wouldn’t even think the word goodbye, in case it became true. She opened her eyes, looked to the mirror, and doused herself in reality—which set in with a shuddering crash, a flare of heat, because God, _look_ —at her, dressed as someone unfamiliar, legs apart, one foot up on the dressing table and her fingers tight in the scrunched folds of her skirt—Joan, behind her on the floor, fingers at the back of her ankle and pencil in hand. Sherlock’s breath caught.

She snapped, “I want to stay in front of the mirror,” and Joan froze, her bowed blonde head visible in the reflection—nothing like a goodbye. “And I want you to keep telling me things I can say _yes_ to.”

Joan was still, quiet, for a few seconds, then she looked up, her voice clear like water: “Really.”

“Really.” A beat—a crooked, red smile.“I suppose I’m not that attached to the tea; the point of the exercise was practising application, not preserving the results, so smudge if you _really_ must—” Joan was laughing, and so was Sherlock, both of them shaking with mirth in the mirror, and Sherlock was struck by the movement—the crease of lines around her own mouth, the tremble of the fabric of her skirt, the strain of the muscles in her thigh.

“Thank you for that permission, Sherlock,” Joan remarked, kneeling up, and Sherlock stiffened, eyes brightening, mouth hitching up—not because of Joan’s words but because her hand had run all the way up the back of Sherlock’s right leg, the one planted on the ground—up, up, surely smearing tea and kohl, Joan’s fingers rough and warm—until she cupped the swell of Sherlock’s backside through the fabric of her knickers.

And squeezed; and squeezed the breath out of Sherlock’s lungs. Her nerves sparked, arousal pulsed between her legs. _Oh_. A second later she was inhaling again, air scraping her throat, and not to be outdone, she flashed her teeth—considered saying, “You’re _welcome_ ,” in a mockingly saccharine tone.

Instead, she said, her voice challenging, wanting, “ _Yes_ ,” and Joan _smacked_ her.

The noise, again, was the worst thing, the best thing, the crack of palm on silk-slippery skin; Sherlock jolted forwards, gasping, and Joan said, bizarrely, her voice stricken and shocked, “Sorry, I—”

“What?”

“Maybe we—”

“Oh, my God, you _stupid_ —”

“I’m sorry—”

“ _Do that again_!” Sherlock hissed, hands fisted tight in her skirt, knuckles white; she thought—if Colette and Lilian were in the living room, could they hear? Oh—who would they tell? To whom could it matter? Crack! The second slap broke through all her thoughts, just a flash of sensation, and as promised, she said, “ _Yes_ —”

Her voice was hoarse and when she dared a glance up at the mirror, Victoire’s hair was hanging over her face—her _face_ looked— _God_ —with her eyes wide and dazed but her mouth with a ravenous set to it. Crack! Joan’s panting breath—could she be panting already?—was blustering against Sherlock’s thigh, as her fingers _groped_. 

Sherlock made an unsteady noise, a ‘hn’, a—a—not a goodbye.

Crack! She rocked on the balls of her spread feet, the muscles of her propped-up leg burning, another noise escaping her mouth, “Ngh—” and she shuddered, now a little bent, head dropping so that she was staring at the floor, her own bare feet.

“Sherlock,” Joan croaked, and then she was pulling down Sherlock’s underwear, pressing her mouth, wet, to one stinging cheek—and her teeth caught, and Jesus, Sherlock had said _no marks_ but wouldn’t it be something, the impression of Joan’s teeth on tender flesh—unique, capable of being used as evidence in a trial, hidden beneath layers of clothing—crack! Sherlock hissed in air through her teeth and sank her nails into her own thigh, fumbling with her skirt, head bowed and every nerve bright, flaming—cheeks, flaming.

The worst thing would be to stop, would be to drop from this heady chaos of pain and heat and Joan, unseen, _felt_ ; “Again,” she gulped, voice hoarse. Crack! “ _Ah_!”

“That,” Joan panted—yes, definitely panted—from behind her, “that is enough for the mirror, I want to see your face—”

Sherlock didn’t know why she said it; a corrective urge, perhaps, that need to be right; but she mumbled, “Victoire’s,” hazily, and in a second—a gasping, flurrying second, where she dropped her skirt, lost her balance—her back was up against the mirror, clattering, stumbling—she was grabbing at Joan with one hand and at the frame of the mirror behind her with the other.

“Don’t,” Joan warned, “if that was what I thought it was, Sherlock, _do not_ —” kissing; Sherlock gulped and groaned and kissed back, bit down on the plumpness of Joan’s lower lip, wondered if Joan was ordering or begging “—unh, _do not_ tell me your cover—”

“Oh, what’s in a name,” Sherlock sneered, gasped, into Joan’s neck, trying to make her shove her again, harder, against the cold pallor of the mirror; “you’re looking at her, I mean do you imagine I’m making myself up for _my_ sake—”

Anything but a goodbye; anything but a leave-taking of this, the clumsy and complicated press of bodies, Joan’s knee between Sherlock’s and her fingers digging into her ribs. This being here. This being here with Joan. “Shut—up—”

Sherlock kissed her; kissed her; kissed her because the safe flat was too still, too static, filled with white noise, the air thick with bated breath—had seen so many people coming in and out of its temporary shelter that it had achieved the almost unreal atmosphere of a doctor’s waiting room. And it reminded Sherlock, terribly, of Surrey in 1939; of the house and spending endless hours in its endless corridors. The waiting, the watch-checking, the way the minutes either snuck by without being seen or yawned endlessly.

Oh but—

But it didn’t matter, it was—

 _Joan_ was—

Joan was immediate; was vital, hot, hard, close. Sherlock scrabbled at Joan’s battle dress trousers (still in uniform!) until her hand slid down beneath layers of fabric, until she touched hot, springy curls dewy with moisture, and then the wet cleft they guarded.

Her breath was coming hard; sweat was breaking on her forehead. Joan swore hard, teeth gritted, gasps ragged—grinning, though, with her brow furrowed. “Did you like it?” Sherlock said, as Joan bore down on the heel of her hand.

“Did I—”

“Did you _like_ it?”

“Say it,” Joan said, one of her hands at Sherlock’s waist and the other in her hand, her eyes bright and her voice forceful. “I want you to say it.”

“Did you like it, did you like getting to _slap_ me?”

“ _Yes_.”

Sherlock bit down hard on everything she wanted to say— _tell me, tell me, describe it, talk about it_ —and kissed Joan, instead, rocked her hand against her, made herself wait, knowing that Joan would start talking if she just left her, coaxed her. She was right; Joan gasped, grunted, dug her fingers in, and finally words started to tumble from her mouth.

“That’s good, keep your hand like that for me—” wet noises, hard breaths “—god, the way you looked, Sherlock, your _arse_ —” Joan thought she wasn’t much for talking during sex and Sherlock could have laughed at the very idea had she had any breath in her lungs “— _pink_ and—” Joan was thrusting her hips against Sherlock’s hand, rough, so that Sherlock, yes, had her fingers between Joan’s legs but was really passive, wrist cramping “—bloody—you _whimpering_ every single t—ev— _unh_ —”

Scattered, kaleidoscopic flashes of images, words, each carried on the hard edge of a gasp—and Sherlock was gasping, over and over again, as Joan came, her face close to Sherlock’s face, her breath hot on Sherlock’s mouth. And her grin. God. She was _grinning_ , open-mouthed, when she hit her climax.

“Look—look at you,” Joan said breathlessly, huge seconds later, their foreheads leant together and Sherlock’s fingers still inside Joan’s trousers. Giddy, giggly. Joan’s eyes kept opening and closing; big, blue, lovely. Her grin hadn’t faded; the rest of her face seemed sweetly exhausted by the sheer power of her smile. “Look at you, beaming. Everyone else thinks you’re a—a miserable sod.”

Was she beaming? A swift mental inventory of her face proved that she was, and Sherlock started giggling along with Joan—not missing the hitch in Joan’s throaty, wracked laughter as Sherlock slowly pulled her trembling fingers from Joan’s cunt, and out of Joan’s opened trousers. “And you?” Sherlock said, her voice vibrating low-down and rough, husky.

“I think—I think I have never met someone with such a—a bloody horrifying sense of fun.” Giggling again. Sherlock caught her mouth, kissed her, and Joan pressed back, groaning against her lower lip, sucking it into her mouth and seguing, somehow, from the playgroundish tone of _sense of fun_ to, “Want to see you—I want to fuck you, Sherlock,” in a way which went straight to Sherlock’s cunt.

“Yes,” said Sherlock, and when Joan growled and lunged into another kiss, “yes, yes,” and her skirt, still rucked up about her hips a little, had nonetheless fallen between them.

“Pull it up,” Joan murmured, her voice slow and sated, almost lazy, “that was—amazing, you holding your skirt up, your legs spread—”

If she didn’t mention it, Sherlock thought, if she didn’t point out that Joan was talking, Joan would keep doing it. So she bit her tongue and said, because it seemed to make Joan swallow and jump a little each time, “Yes,” and tugged her skirt up above her hips.

“ _God_.” Joan’s hands were smeared with eyeliner and tanned with tea, Sherlock saw with a start, and wondered what the back of her legs must look like—messy, ruined. Then two of Joan’s fingers were between her legs, pushing the soaked gusset of her knickers against her, making her feel how the fabric stuck to her. 

“You,” Sherlock said, desperately tempted to point it out, _the things you say when you forget yourself_ , but she was saved from it by Joan pushing the wet silk aside and rubbing the fingertip of her index finger against Sherlock’s swollen clit. “Oh.”

“Keep it up,” Joan said, and Sherlock didn’t know if she meant her skirt, or her noises, or her—this, doing what Joan wanted—she gave a breathless laugh at the very idea, because really she was doing what _she_ wanted, with some—some helpful direction from Joan. She’d give her that much— “Good, Sherlock, God” — _oh_ she’d give her a lot. 

“Anything,” Sherlock said hazily, giddily, accidentally. Fortunately Joan didn’t catch the train of thought it had erupted from, and just hummed her slow approval, changed her rhythm, circled; “Ah…” Joan’s free hand pushed up her side, plucked open her blouse.

“You,” she said, “you know this damned blouse is really too tight—” folding down the cups of Sherlock’s brassiere, so that her breasts were bared “— and I have to watch the buttons strain all bloody day—”

“No one made you,” Sherlock said, and then gave a victorious, pained hiss as Joan pinched, couldn’t stop herself saying, “oh, yes, good—” stopping when Joan stopped, staring at her. “What,” she said. And then, because she was suddenly afraid, sneering a little, unconvincingly, “I suppose—I suppose it’s _strange_ , this kind of thing—”

Joan swallowed Sherlock’s nervous gasps and sneers in a kiss, her fingertips dimpling the flesh of Sherlock’s breast as she gripped. “No,” she said, “no, yes, it’s strange, but no, I—no. Shut up.”

“Yes.”

“ _God_ , keep saying that.”

“Can’t—you know I can’t do both—” That made Joan _smack_ her, and Sherlock yelped, loud enough to make Joan suddenly cram her hand over her mouth and stare at her with wide eyes. But the flat remained silent, and the effect of the slap—the flat of Joan’s hand against the bouncing side of Sherlock’s breast, not even hard enough to really sting but _enough_ —still coursed through Sherlock in hot waves of sensation.

“Oh,” she said, voice sounding clogged and helpless, cracked, “oh.”

 _Smack_ , another—there was no room between them for Joan to be forceful, but it was enough. At each blow, Sherlock jolted, lost her breath, the motion making her buck against Joan’s slippery fingers. “Ah!” And the noises, she couldn’t help the noises; Joan dragged them out of her, and there was a pleasure in letting them tumble uncaringly out of her mouth; here, at the edge of things, when there were other, bigger secrets to keep; where no one, surely, could care. Smack. “ _Ah_!”

On. And on and on. Sherlock was gasping, whining, her breaths coming in sobs. Her throat was full of spit, was clogged with swallowing and gasping; her lips were wet, her thighs were wet and—and the tea would run, she thought with a dizzy, curious sweep of heat. 

_No marks_ she had said, but what could it matter? Joan was talking again: “...gorgeous, bloody gorgeous…”

There was sweat pouring down her face, Joan was gripping her left breast and pushing her fingers into her, “Tell me it’s alright,” and Sherlock’s mouth shaped _yes, yes_ , only sometimes getting her voice to sound—damned unreliable body, damned unreliable heart—and her vision was blurry, “Jesus, _Sherlock_ ,” and she came shuddering, gulping, choking.

She dropped her head onto Joan’s shoulder and for a long time they didn’t move. The air felt sticky. Sherlock’s mind whined anxiously, hummed, rose in pitch—dropped, quieted.

They breathed in tandem, their chests rising and falling, both of them leaning against the other and balancing each other out. “I am,” Sherlock said, “I am pleased I met you.”

“Sherlock.”

“You’ll probably want me to tell you whether or not, uh—” she had run out of breath, had to swallow and rub her damp cheek against the rough fabric of Joan’s BD jacket “—nn. Whether or not either of us is, ah, going. Tonight. But—I don’t know. I’m—”

“It’s okay,” Joan said. She sounded a little too firm for it to really ring true. “It’s okay, I mean. How are you meant to know?”

“I should, really—” Her fists were tight in Joan’s clothes. Joan was holding onto her just as fervently, gripping at her curls.

“No,” she insisted, “no, that’s ridiculous, Sherlock. You don’t have to know.”

So Sherlock just pressed her face tighter into her shoulder, inhaled the smell of her soap and the perfume which was still _just_ about clinging, and knew that in all probability neither of them would leave the flat tonight. And there was no reason to say goodbye.

She lifted her head, and leaned her face closed; their foreheads touched, their noses bumped. She sighed. Joan seemed to catch it on her lips, sighed back. “I meant it,” Sherlock said.

“I know,” Joan replied.

“Good.” Sherlock straightened, still feeling dizzy but no longer, perhaps, needing to clutch for support. “Now I want to take a bath.”

Joan gave a short, stunned, not unhappy laugh, and kissed her, suddenly—just once, irreverent of passionate conventions, just a sweet wet peck which made Sherlock’s heart swoop upwards in her chest and her ribs seem to suddenly try to strangle her lungs. They broke apart grinning.

“I’ll run it,” Joan suggested, but Sherlock scoffed, shook her off, and left her by the mirror as she righted her blouse and made to stalk unsteadily out of the room, in the direction of the bathroom on the hall.

“Hey, Sherlock.” Sherlock turned. “Nice stockings.”

Sherlock glanced down at the smudged mess of her legs; leant backwards and to the side to examine them with the proper thoughtful curiosity. Then she looked up. Sniffed. “I _tried_ to tell you,” she said, and left while Joan was still laughing, her own mouth crooked upwards in a smirk.

She met no one on her way to the bathroom; from the burble of a wireless, just faintly audible now that she was out of the bedroom, Lilian and Colette were in the living room, oblivious. The thought was—really, rather amusing. She smiled, opened the door to the bathroom, and stopped dead.

At least, she consoled herself after a few blinking seconds, staring at her own image in the mirror above the sink, directly above the door, she now knew that beetroot juice smeared—if one coloured one’s lips with it, and then proceeded to kiss someone enthusiastically.

When she got out of the bath, Sherlock decided, turning both taps—to a great cacophony of creaks and gurgles in the pipes, before water spurted, then rushed into the bathtub—she was having words with Joan about letting her out of the bedroom in that sort of state. But until then—standing in front of the mirror scrubbing her face and waiting for the bath to fill—well, it was a _little_ funny, wasn’t it?

The bathwater having reached an unpatriotic depth, Sherlock turned the taps off, dropped her clothes onto the floor and sank down in it, not quite able to stop a sigh. Then, finally, she looked down at her bare, submerged body; _no marks_ , she had said, she remembered, and couldn’t help find that amusing, too. Her breasts were milky white and warm pink, coloured with Joan’s slaps; her backside stung faintly against the smooth bottom of the tub. Still, nothing could top the mess of her legs—fingerprinted, tea-smudged, already turning the water yellowish.

Sherlock breathed, leaned back, and let the evidence wash away.

Sweat, tea, bathwater; _what_ a summation of a life. Better, though, than losing patience on trains. She stayed there—suspended, it felt like, in hot water—long enough to lose track of the minutes.

Distantly there was the creak of a door; the sudden stutter of a wireless being turned off in another room.

Sherlock opened her eyes and stared at the flaky white ceiling, her neck against the rim of the tub.

Joan had heard it too; the whine of their bedroom door opening announced as much, and then there was the clatter of her footsteps coming down the corridor—stopping before the bathroom door. “Go,” Sherlock intoned before Joan could so much as grip the handle; her face impassive, her eyes staring up. There was a beat of silence, and then Joan turned on her heel and her footsteps faded towards the living room. There was another creak of a door.

The low chant of a male voice. Not Harding. Someone unfamiliar. It pulsed evenly, mildly through the walls—words indiscernible, but that didn’t matter. Sherlock knew what he was saying.

Her chest was quivering, heart like a trapped hummingbird.

For all the gentleness of the man’s rumbling tone, his muffled diction had all the insistent bleating quality of a telephone. The same threat, the same anticipation. Sherlock’s breaths were shallow, silvery, stinging her throat.

She knew what the news was when she heard the thud of Joan’s footsteps coming back again. She closed her mouth, closed her eyes. The door creaked open, admitted Joan, shut again.

“Me,” Joan said. “It’s me.”

Sherlock sat up with a sucking of surface tension, a scatter of drops, raining, pouring: “I know,” she said. “Joan—”

Joan dropped to her knees beside the tub, said, “I don’t have long,” kissed her once. Her face was waxy in the harsh bathroom light. 

“Joan—”

“I have to go.”

“We’ve said goodbye,” Sherlock said. Joan’s hands were cupping her face; her eyes, her blue and lovely eyes, were fixed on her. 

“Yeah,” Joan said, and she had the gall—the guts—to grin. “Yeah, we have.”

“Enjoy yourself,” said Sherlock, and they kissed again—close, breathless, hot. Finally Joan stood up, straightened her battle dress, nodded once. Sherlock nodded back.

The door closed behind her. Joan’s footsteps thudded off to the bedroom; thudded back. Fetching something had been her pretext, then; and, Sherlock supposed, a woman could reasonably say goodbye to her friend in these circumstances. It wouldn’t be unusual.

Then the telephone-murmur of the man’s voice started up again. The higher cadences of Joan’s response made him fall silent. The distant front door creaked. The wireless spluttered back to life.

Sherlock closed her eyes, decided to try for two minutes, and sank under her bathwater.

**SHERRINFORD HOUSE  
** **SURREY**  
 **1939**

At the age of eight, Sherlock Holmes had trained herself to stay under the water of her bath for almost four minutes. Her reasons had been as follows: in the case of her ever having the opportunity to study the flora and fauna of the Great Barrier Reef, such skills would surely come in useful; similarly, should anyone try to drown her, she would be better prepared than most to survive; and if she should ever make up her mind to drown herself, she would have a definite timeframe.

And now here she was, twenty-two and back again; pulled back by this cord which seemed to reach in under her ribs, to draw her back again and again to the House; to this bathtub, actually, where she had been eight years old and in love with coral on the other side of the world; and ten years old and in love with the violin; where she had been herself in various shapes and sizes, all of them unsatisfactory at the time and embarrassing in memory, not because they were especially egregious but because they belonged to her and she couldn’t cut them loose. There was something mortifying about ever having been a child. Something embarrassing about ever having been anything but what she was. Her past selves were too close. And too far away. They flickered like faces in water, drifting in and out of coherency. A fistful of moonlight; why do you do it, Sherlock?

And now here she was, twenty-two and back, again, and breathing water. Her throat spasming. Chest shuddering. She felt it happening far away. Why do you do it, Sherlock? Oh, she didn’t know. Didn’t know. And they thought she ought to; she thought she ought to—

—if only she hadn’t mentioned the shoes.

But Carl Powers and his shoes belonged to only one phase of her general, vague, hollow life; were only some of the facts sitting on her chest, keeping her underwater.

She could feel the tug at the roots of her hair as her curls unwound above her, now. She could feel the heaviness of her limbs, not comforting but warm, at least. And finally she could feel the strain and stretch of her lungs and the blackness of falling into, falling away from, falling, and, yes, falling, until: until: (the earthquake of a heartbeat):

Crash.

A succession of images: Mycroft’s colourless eyes wide and horrified—the soaked bathroom floor viewed from over the side of the bathtub, half-obscured by a tangle of wet curls hanging over her face—the sodden sleeves of Mycroft’s suit.

Sherlock hacked up water over the side of the tub, scrabbling for purchase at the rim, while with one hand on her shoulder Mycroft kept her out of the water, pushed up against the side. With the other she pulled the plug.

The bathwater rattled and slurped away, gurgling and knocking in the pipes, and Sherlock closed her eyes, waiting until Mycroft either trusted her to sit up alone, or lost the energy or the ability to try to keep her upright. 

Finally Mycroft’s hand left her shoulder. Sherlock didn’t sink back down into the tub, just slumped over the side, her hands on the rim and her face on her hands and shivering though her brain had yet to register the cold; the phenobarbital in her system made her feel warm and heavy, her blood thick and slow in her veins. There was a pressure in her head. Twenty two years of remembering every detail pressing in behind her eyes.

The towel fell heavy around her shoulders. Her brain sparked; she was breathing. And Mycroft—and _Mycroft_ …

Slowly, she managed to look up, leaning her cheek on the rim of the tub.

Mycroft was sitting on the bathroom floor, her suit splashed, soaked to the elbow. Her back was against the side of the tub. Her legs were straight out in front of her. She looked absurd. Sherlock supposed they both looked absurd. There was something horrible in how her sister just stared in front of her, blinking; baffled.

Sherlock screwed her eyes shut tight, heart jerking in her chest, throat burning, and hated Mycroft for being confused by her. They had never confused each other as children. And Mycroft was clever; very clever; more so than Sherlock, that had always been clear. Why had Mycroft changed things? Why was this getting the better of her?

It was a long while before either of them spoke; when Mycroft finally did, was one of very few times Sherlock could remember her being to one to willingly break a silence between them.

In a tone of slow, numb shock, Mycroft said, “I don’t suppose that it’s just because of what went wrong with the Powers investigation.”

She said it both with and without hope, and Sherlock would have laughed if she could have worked her lungs into it. Mycroft knew that it wasn’t just because of _what went wrong_ with the Powers investigation. All she was saying was _wouldn’t it have been nice if_ —.

And wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it have indeed been nice if Sherlock had taken a Nembutal and then taken a bath for a reason so simple, so earthly, so easy to fit into an equation and call solved?

“It’s not just because of that,” Sherlock replied, her voice waterlogged, hoarse, and put her head down on her arms where they rested on the side of the tub. Mycroft said no more.

Sherlock couldn’t tell how long they sat there like that, both of them in their personal emergencies and a whole sea of silence in the way. Finally Sherlock’s teeth started to chatter, droplets shivering off her bare shoulders. Mycroft started to move again, slowly blinking herself back into the world, stumbling up from the bathroom floor, finding Sherlock another towel.

“I shall find you some clothes,” she said at the door, and her voice came from far away inside herself, where she still seemed to be shipwrecked. She didn’t turn her head fully, or look at Sherlock directly; but then she didn’t seem to be seeing anything outside of herself. Her movements were slow, careful, and so was her speech. All of it suggested a convincing impression of functionality. “You know the law, of course—I’ll get a doctor in—tame, naturally—but all the same it would be unwise to be—overly frank. You do understand, Sherlock.”

“You’ll cover it up,” said Sherlock. “Of course you’ll cover it up.”

Mycroft said, “Yes.”

Sherlock’s voice was a groaning snarl, a whine, her shoulders shaking, her breath burning her throat: “ _Don’t_ expect me to _thank_ you—”

Halfway out of the door, Mycroft said, quietly, “I would never ask you to thank me, Sherlock.” She didn’t say it fiercely; but then Mycroft was never fierce, only steady, and perhaps she had never been steadier.

**LONDON**   
**AUGUST 1942**

_Enjoy yourself_. Sherlock’s words whispered themselves into Joan’s ear at every turn, while she stared out of the window of the unmarked car that took her away from the safe flat.

It was a slow start.

First, Joan was installed in a ground floor flat, and once she had settled herself down on the sofa in the living room, the door was firmly closed on her. Conversations burbled urgently in the corridor outside. She looked around. The place was salmon-pink, as if embarrassed to be seen, with sparse furniture and sad wallpaper which cracked and sagged in the corners. She had been given instructions not to open the curtains. Before she could think any more on the subject, the door opened, and the man who had come to collect her said, “Sorry, we’ve actually got to move you.”

The next flat was decorated identically, but was on the second storey, and boasted a coffee table set with tea, milk, sugar—real—as well as scones; and most startlingly a full bottle of whiskey, with a glass set beside it. It also possessed another occupant, who quickly distracted Joan from the spread; a FANY corporal in an adjoining chamber who poked her curly auburn head into the living room and said, “Hullo, Joan,” very chummily. “My name’s Cathy. Cathy Hapworth. Want to come through? I’ve got clothes to issue you with.”

Joan came through. The bedroom of the flat had an eerie, plastic air, lit by lamps, the blackout curtains drawn even though it was only early evening. There was something antiseptic about the unslept-in bed, with its rigid-looking pillows and worn bedspread. It felt like stepping into a doll’s house. Joan wondered how many of these fake flats were in the building; if SOE owned the whole place, or just rented a few rooms, and if people’s normal lives played out around them. 

Cathy spoke as she spread out clothing on the bed; a jigsaw of grey and blue. Sherlock’s colours, really. “We’ve packed a suitcase for you, but really there’s very little you can realistically take. You know your cover story?”

The prompt was a welcome distraction from thoughts of Sherlock. Joan clasped her hands more firmly behind her back. “Angeline Mercier,” she recited. “Callsign Narrator, code name Juliette. Twenty-seven, spinster, used to work behind the counter at a little village tabac but has decided to move on since her brother married—so she says, anyway. Probably more like her new sister-in-law forced her out. She’s cousin to Francois Allard…” She licked her lips. “Who is the network organiser. Code name Armand. It was on his recommendation that Angeline—”

“ _Ah_ —”

“—that _I_ was able to secure work keeping house for M. Bouchard, a widower who lives outside the village with his youngest son. He has another, but he’s married, lives in the village.” The rest wasn’t quite her cover story, but she added it to prove that she could remember it; “They’re all Resistance sympathisers, especially the sons, though M. Bouchard doesn’t want to know about any sabotage. As far as he knows, our sort of resistance is political, passive...unarmed.”

“All very good,” Cathy announced, as if Joan had listed off her times tables properly. She hefted a suitcase onto the bed. “Take a look; in fact get familiar with it. It’s yours, after all. Your papers are in there, too, and you need to know all the details.”

She knew all the details already; had been briefed on everything they contained. Her head was full of the life of Angeline Mercier. She had even seen her Vichy _carte d’identité_ when she had been called in to fingerprint it. It hadn’t filled her with confidence—had looked too bright, too clean—but the technician who had been attending her had laughed at the look on her face and said, “Don’t worry, Corporal, it’s not done _yet_.”

Still, Joan snapped open the catches on the suitcase with an uneasy anticipation, wondering if she’d find something which would make her say _this is mad, why are you making me do this_. Almost hoping, in fact. Not because she wanted to stop, but because she felt like she _should_ be frightened.

But all that was inside the suitcase was a perfectly ordinary set of folded, worn clothes, and a small bundle of crumpled papers. She picked them up, flicked through them. A tattered French ration-book; her _Certificat de non-appartenance à la race juive_ ; and the _carte d’identité_ which she had been so doubtful of, now mysteriously aged. Not just yellowed, either, but folded, dog-eared, some of the ink faded from black to blue, and—she lifted it to her nose.

“They’re pretty clever, aren’t they?” Cathy said, smiling. “Used to work at a tabac, remember. All the clothes are a bit smoky.”

“Clever,” Joan agreed, a little weakly, lowering the paper and wishing the dark tobacco smell wasn’t quite so reminiscent of Sherlock’s hair. She put the papers back, and started digging through the clothes, feeling out bobbly, well-worn wool cardigans and skirts, and blouses which had been washed soft and slippery.

“The network isn’t centred around the village, and in fact is attempting to spread out, in order to avoid excessive concentration of agents. Still, as sabotage goes, it’s one of the more active circuits in France. Remember that your position at the Bouchard house is unlikely to be permanent—”

“If the authorities get suspicious, I’m running off with the son,” Joan said, eyebrows raising. Cathy was listing off things she already knew; trying to give her a last-minute drilling. “I know. The point is to hide the sabotage in the scandal.”

“You may have to act quickly. What poem are you using for your code, again?”

Joan ignored the question and asked, instead, “Where’s my gun?”, straightening up and frowning at Cathy. She gaped back at her, her easy, cheery air knocked out of her, mouthing goldfish shapes for a second:

“I’m not—you know it’s optional to take the gun, don’t you? Most people choose not to take it because it’s difficult to explain, particularly for women—”

“Right,” said Joan, “they choose not to take it. I don’t think I’ve been given a choice yet. Could I have my gun, please, Corporal?”

Cathy hesitated, and then said, “I’ll call Baker Street and see about having one issued, ma’am,” looking flustered as she hurried from the room; apparently she was only confident and chatty within the confines of a well-rehearsed script. Joan wondered why she had addressed her as ‘ma’am’; if she had mistaken her for an officer, or if that was simply protocol. Deference for those about to step into the dark. It wouldn’t be out of keeping with the rest of the treatment—the teapot with real milk and real sugar standing beside it, the scones with a practically pre-war buttery sheen, the whiskey.

Joan didn’t like it. It was too hushed, too awed. Funereal. She grimaced.

To have something to do, she stripped off and started pulling on the clothes which had been left out on the bed. Wool scraped against her skin. She kept her mind on fabric, on fastenings. The people in Artefacts (Joan thought of Molly, and fastened her skirt with a rough, tense gesture) had no great opinion on the fashion sense of paysannes under the Vichy regime, for which Joan was grateful. The skirt was long, grey, shapeless, the blouse a long way from its original white—through age and repeated washings rather than dirtiness. It hung loose on her frame, suggesting a recent loss of weight. By the time she had pushed her feet into the battered, much-mended boots, she felt distinctly closer to Angeline.

She looked in the mirror for a few moments, seeing herself but not. Her throat convulsed, once, as she swallowed. 

But outside the door there was the sound of footsteps, burbling voices, Cathy’s and—

“Sir,” Joan said, the second Harding came in. He grinned at her; crooked, toothy, as rakish as ever. He was carrying his cap, and had a briefcase beneath his arm. Cathy, beside him, was carrying a handgun case, which she put on the bed.

“That’s for,” Cathy began, but she was interrupted.

“Alright, Corporal,” Harding said in tones of dismissal, and for a moment Joan blinked, thinking he meant her—but of course Cathy was the one to hurry away. She shut the door after her, leaving them alone.

For a few moments, they just looked at each other. Then Joan spread her hands, raised her eyebrows, and said, “Do I look French?”

“Not with that bloody accent, Watson,” Harding barked, grin curling his mouth upwards again as he dropped the case onto the bed. Joan laughed.

“Yeah, well, I won’t use it in France,” she said, and when Harding gestured towards the case which Cathy had brought, she stepped across and opened it. Within, gleaming, was the same small Colt pistol she had trained with; the _same_ , not simply a match for the brand and calibre.

“If it gets back to me that you let out so much as a _hello_ in English, you’ll be for it when you get back. _And_.” He turned to her, raised his eyebrows, and sprung the catches on his briefcase without looking at them. “I was just leaving Baker Street when a FANY ran up to me and said you’d been making a fuss about your gun.”

__“Not a fuss, sir,” Joan said mildly, weighing the pistol in her hand and admiring the sheen on the nicked barrel. The world seemed to carry itself much more comfortably when she had the grip of a gun against her palm._ _

__“Right you are, Lieutenant.”_ _

__Joan blinked, hard, once, and looked to him. He stood there blunt, rough-edged, amused, immovable._ _

__“Sir,” she said, glad that her voice stayed even; Harding raised his eyebrows at her, reached into the briefcase he had brought and held out a rolled sheet of plain white paper. She looked at it, then up to his face._ _

__“Take it,” he said. “Official notification of your commission.”_ _

__Joan put the gun down and took it, her eyes skimming unseeingly over the neat type: so precise she could almost hear the typewriter clatter. The ink was fresh enough to smear. Snatches of words snagged in her brain between blinks: “approved your appointment”, “bestow the honorary rank of Lieutenant”, “no grant in respect to uniform allowance will be payable to you”—for a moment, she was even confused enough to wonder why she wouldn’t be afforded an officer’s uniform, before she remembered that she wouldn’t be in uniform for months._ _

__She shook her head—shook the print away—stared up at Harding. “Thank you, sir,” she said. Her hands were so damp with sweat she thought they might smudge the type on the page. “Uh—sir?”_ _

__“Yes?”_ _

__“Why Lieutenant, why not Ensign?”_ _

__“Because in a few months, Watson,” Harding said, “I’m going to have to stand by and grit my teeth as Sherlock Holmes gets promoted to Assistant Section Officer, and if I have to live in that kind of world, I at least want to know that somewhere out there, you bloody well outrank her.” By the end of this, Joan was laughing, rubbing at her forehead, unable to keep from grinning. Alright. Lieutenant Watson. Alright. It was a flimsy thing to hold up to the terror of France, really, but it wasn’t worthless. Something to take with her, like the gun._ _

__But not the paper. She looked around for somewhere to put it. Harding held out his hand. “I’ll keep it safe for you,” he said. “Then you can stick it in a frame or whatever women like to do with these things. Tie it in ribbon. How are you feeling?”_ _

__“Fine,” Joan said._ _

__“Good,” said Harding, tucking the notice of Joan’s commission back into his briefcase. “Something else to issue you with.” And he held out a franc._ _

__For a moment, she blinked; then she said, “Oh,” then, “No thanks.”_ _

__As if he hadn’t heard her, Harding told her what she had already realised. “Your L-pill is inside.” Always L-pills. In training, Sherlock had referred to them as suicide pills and the instructor had lost his temper. “There’s a scratch on the side so you can identify it, but keep it separate from the rest of your money if you can. Knock it against something hard, it’ll crack. Then you need to crush the tablet between your back teeth.”_ _

__“I know, it was covered in training—sorry. No.”_ _

__“Watson,” Harding said quietly. “Do you think I _want_ to talk about the possibility that you’ll have to use it? I’m not here for fun.”_ _

__“Sir—”_ _

__“Listen to me. This isn’t about committing suicide.” Joan pushed her lips together, pushed her chin up, and didn’t respond. “This is about the protection of intelligence. If the Germans get their hands on you, you’ll talk. Everyone talks. No one is so good at their job or so in love with their country that they won’t talk.”_ _

__Joan looked at the fake coin for a few more moments, wetting her lips. “Right,” she said, and took it._ _

__Harding said, “Anyone who uses it gets some kind of _in the course of duty_ on all the official paperwork. Full military funeral, albeit with an empty coffin. Honours and all. And whatever we can claw out of the coffers for the family.”_ _

__Joan put the the coin into her case. She knew it would be foolish to say thank you, so she just said, “Sir.” Harding watched her._ _

__After a few moments, he exhaled, put his hands in his pockets. “So. Drunk yet?”_ _

__“Should I be?”_ _

__“What do you think the whiskey’s for, Watson? Stay there—” He stomped out of the room and seized the whiskey, leaving the door open. Through the doorway, Joan saw him pour out a healthy measure into the glass, and another into the teacup._ _

__“I really have been wondering, sir,” Joan said, as Harding came back and handed her the glass, “how the hell you got on in regular service.”_ _

__“I thought I told you,” Harding replied, knocking the tea cup against the rim of the glass with a hard clink, and swallowing a gulp of whiskey, “my entire career’s been irregular.”_ _

__They were standing close together in the hot, dank little room. The salmon-coloured walls were darkened to something stolid and pink by the hard-burning orange lamps which seemed to clog the air rather than illuminate it. The smell of whiskey was thick between them. Harding’s mouth was crooked upwards. “You must have had to do some square-bashing once upon a time, sir,” Joan said, weighing the glass in her hand and looking up at him._ _

__“I try not to dwell. And that’s very familiar talk from a junior officer to her superior, Watson. Drink up, that’s an order.”_ _

__Joan grinned, and took a swallow of whiskey. It slipped hot down her throat, made her sigh; a faint, catching noise. “Can’t have this on my breath when I get there, can I?” she said. The air felt wet with drink, her skin prickling._ _

__“You’ll be fine, just don’t kiss any pro-Germans.”_ _

__Joan remembered the taste of the inside of Sherlock’s mouth. Beetroot. Bleeding red lips. Smeared over her chin. “Yessir. Good advice, sir.”_ _

__“They’ll keep you going while you’re flying, too; it’s both protocol and tradition that you get a hot toddy before you jump.”_ _

__And a bloody good thing, too; now that she had swallowed some whiskey she understood the appeal under the circumstances. Still, for the sake of cover, she remarked, “That sounds impressively inadvisable.”_ _

__“Tell you what: when he comes back, I’ll ask your pilot whether you felt the same ten minutes before making the jump.”_ _

__Finally, Joan laughed, stepping back and putting the glass down on the bedside table. She shook away all thoughts of Sherlock as best she could, which wasn’t very. She patted down her skirt, flexed her fingers, and sighed._ _

__“I feel like I’m missing something,” she said._ _

__“Yeah,” Harding said, raising an eyebrow, “I damn well hope you do, or it’d be very interesting watching you trying to parachute. You haven’t been kitted out for the jump yet. The lovely Corporal Hapworth’ll be back in a second with your striptrease suit; you’ll have to lose the skirt.”_ _

__Joan waved her hand, half amused and half exasperated that SOE could think of no better term for the jumpsuits worn by people parachuting down from planes. “Skirts fit underneath. You just have to roll them up.” _Keep it up_. “The suits aren’t exactly tight.”_ _

__“That so? There’s ingenuity for you.”_ _

__“You knew that, sir, you were just seeing if I did.”_ _

__“Maybe. Maybe.” Harding took another gulp from the tea cup—Joan fancied he might actually have finished his whiskey in two swallows—and glanced around for somewhere to put it. It ended up atop a chest of drawers. He turned, cleared his throat, and said, “Everything else you’ve got, though. Believe me. It always seems flimsy going out, but you’re solid. And I’m not going to repeat what I’ve already told you for the sake of reassuring you when I know you can remember it.”_ _

__Joan’s fingers curled slowly around her glass, picking it up again; it was cold in her hand, but she felt very warm. _You’ll do alright in France_. “Yeah,” she said, thinking about Sherlock, who would do alright in France, too; _enjoy yourself_ , she had said._ _

__Joan wished she had said something back. _You too_ , maybe. Or _look after yourself_. Or _have fun_. Anything but the stupid, speechless nod she had given._ _

__“Anyway,” Harding said. “I’ve got something for you.”_ _

__“What?” Joan said, brow crumpling, hand lowering without the glass meeting her lips again; the phrase struck an immediate chord of unease, made her stomach dip and shudder. Not more bloody, _bloody_ active service goodbyes, she thought. Harding, of all people, should have understood._ _

__And maybe he did, because he raised one of his huge hands and said, “Don’t worry,” returning to the open case he had left on the bed, its contents shielded from Joan’s view. “It’s practical. And it’s protocol; every agent gets a commission if they haven’t already, and a drink and a gift no matter what. Tokens of our thanks and hopes. Usually I get the girls trinkets, you know—French stuff that they can take with them, compacts and bracelets and things—but I didn’t think you’d have much time for that. Here.”_ _

__He was holding out a service revolver; a Colt .32, the same sort that she had trained with, the same sort that she had already been issued with._ _

__“I,” said Joan, wondering how he had missed the handgun on the bed, even while she tried to work out what _she_ had missed, feeling the facts start to slip, grate off each other, “was already given one—”_ _

__“You were issued with one,” Harding corrected her, “and you’ll have to hand it back once you’re out of France. This one’s yours. It’s not inscribed or initialed or any nonsense, it’s just a good gun for a good shot.” A handful of hot metal; what had made her think that? Perhaps it was the glint on the gun, so like the glint on those sweaty coins her father had poured into her palm on those burnt-through summer days in 1925._ _

__She reached out for it. Immediately he pulled it away, put it back in the case, smiled knowingly. “Come and get it when you get back.”_ _

__Joan understood. Dropped her hand. Harding’s smile was a slice of half-moon. She was ready, Joan realised; there was little more to it. She dropped her hand, and turned to pick up the other gun again, the one she had been issued with rather the one she had been gifted, remembering that the striptease suits had holsters for firearms. After that, though, she would have to work out where to keep it; whether to carry it always, or leave it in her case…_ _

___Enjoy yourself_. She felt like she might look over her shoulder and see herself, ten years old, on tiptoe at the carnival with dust in her lungs, with sweat on her brow, with her dad behind her; with a hard-thudding heart and one eye open. Terrible form. Good results. Self-taught, whatever her dad thought. But of course it was just her and Harding, and the gun in her hand. She looked up and grinned at him, and he said, “Ready to go?”_ _

  
**  
**END PART ONE.  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes; we are officially at a narrative half-way point. Thank you for reading! The next chapter will be here on, ooh er. Monday 18th November! As this is a sort of landmark, I want to draw your particular attention to my beta [lbmisscharlie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/works), who has been a paragon and a saviour since this story really began to take shape. I cannot thank her enough.
> 
> Now, notes!
> 
>  **"You know the law, of course"** \- Until 1961, suicide was still a crime and could be punished by imprisonment if unsuccessful. Families of those who did manage to commit suicide could also be prosecuted.
> 
>  **"L-pill"** \- Anyone who's seen Skyfall knows the drill here, although the pill in Skyfall contains something corrosive rather than poisonous; what Joan's being issued with here is a cyanide capsule, which would cause death within seconds. (There is a historical precedent for spies hiding their L-pills in their teeth, and the reason I didn't go with that in this story is, well, I didn't want to look like I was copying Skyfall).
> 
>  **"drunk yet?"** \- SOE very seriously got its agents hammered before dropping them into France. One thing I didn't get in here is that they apparently used to say 'merde alors' in place of good luck. A lot of the details of Harding's send-off are borrowed from real life; in fact, much of it is borrowed from Maurice Buckmaster, the historical head of F-Section, who gave all of his agents presents and was deeply involved in their training.
> 
> Guess where Part Two takes us. Go on. Guess.


	17. Mercier & Renaud.

****

**PART TWO.**

**CHABRIS  
**  
FRANCE, ZONE NON-OCCUPÉE  
24th OCTOBER 1942

The dark shone wetly, the gloom deep and arboreal ahead of them. The only sounds were the tramp of footsteps, the quick, dry, papery sounds of all four of them breathing. They were halfway out of the forest, and they hadn’t yet heard the explosions.

At the head of the party, Armand kept checking his watch, clenching his thick fingers over and over by his sides. Even though walking in darkness was safest, he had to flick on his torch each time he wanted to look at the time, burning out everybody’s night vision. Joan gritted her teeth and shielded her face from the latest dangerous blast of light with a grimace. 

There was dirt under Armand’s nails, and a trembling roughness to his hands. Joan saw it even though she didn’t want to.

He flicked his torch off, leaving Joan to squint in the new gloom, after-images floating before her. “It’s gone fifteen minutes since we set the damned things,” he hissed in his bitter Harrow English, addressing himself to Joan, who tightened her mouth and spoke back in pointed French.

“You know how a time pencil works,” she replied, staring straight ahead and trampling branches, leaves, under the soles of her boots. “It’s a cold night. Slows down the reaction of the acid.”

“They teach that to all English girls?” said Léandre Bouchard, his teeth white in the greenish gloom—his hand on his pack, slung over his shoulder. Joan flashed him a grin of her own.

“ _Bien sûr_.” 

But they both knew when to stop joking, and the darkness seemed to force its way into all of them; they were all listening, after all, all waiting, even if only Armand was obsessively checking his watch. Léandre didn’t reply, and Armand scowled out into the earthy blackness, battering back a few branches. Nothing so much as stirred in the underbrush; all that moved was their party, and the dirt disturbed by their booted feet. “I don’t like it,” Armand insisted, and Joan saw the dark shape of his arm move, reach for his torch again. She grabbed his wrist to stop him, felt him tense.

“You should be glad,” Joan said, slowly releasing her grip. There was no point in saying _you make us a target every time you turn that damn thing on_. The truth wouldn’t solve the problem. “The point of a delay is to get away in time, and we’ve more than managed that. You’ve more than managed that. So just keep walking.”

Her shook off her hand roughly, and said, “Don’t touch me.”

Later, Joan would wonder why the hell she had thought imitating Marie would help; she was nothing like Marie, after all, and had only known Armand for two months, while Marie had known him since their posting together half a year since. Still, “Armand,” she tried, in that way Marie always said it—calm, gentle.

He stiffened. It was like a shudder of a breeze, a rustle of branches, except the forest didn’t move at all. Joan’s heart sank; Armand took a step closer to her. In the corner of her vision, she saw the black shapes of Léandre and Serge detach from the shadows, hurry forwards, but she put out a hand to them. Stop.

The was the smell of dark liquor on Armand’s breath, making the air between them wet and hot. Joan wondered how Marie stood kissing him; wondered, too, how he got enough alcohol to drown his sorrows, who he bribed and who he threatened, and how far his black market dealings compromised their clandestine activities. “Who the hell,” Armand spat in English, “do you think you are.”

In French, her mouth downturned and her voice cool, Joan said, “If I told you, I wouldn’t be much of a spy, would I.”

He started towards her—but she didn’t flinch, and he dropped his hand.

“Do you hear anything, Juliette?” he inquired. Still in English.

“No.”

“Exactly. That’s because your shoddy bloody traps haven’t gone off, so _pardonnez-moi_ all of you—” He shoved by her, a great, bearish, alcohol-breathed shape in the dark, forcing her to stumble back, then pushing between Serge and Léandre.

“ _Merde_ —Armand, get back here—” 

Joan started forwards but was caught by Serge, with his big hands and hot breath, who hissed, “If you both go, you both get caught, either by your own bombs or by the police.”

After two months in Chabris, Joan had a reputation amongst some of the local members of the Resistance. The story was that she never threatened anyone. Most of them interpreted it wrongly and laughed; the ones who understood smiled. It held true in this case. She didn’t threaten Serge. She just drove her elbow hard into his stomach and felt his grip loosen as he made a breathless sound like _ugh_ , stumbling back. 

Léandre grabbed her shoulder—not to stop her, but to get her attention. In the distance, Armand’s footsteps were fading fast, thrashing and cracking through the forest. “Listen,” Léandre said, “something has to be done about him—”

“Yeah,” Joan agreed, taking his hand off her shoulder and unholstering her gun, “but I’m not letting him run off to get killed. Head back to the safehouse, tell Marie what’s happened. I’ll be fine.”

She was moving even as she delivered this last, her even breath loud in her ears but her focus on catching up with her network organiser.

Dark. Greenish black. Branches snagged on her clothes, whipped her cheeks. She ducked, dodged. Her concentration wasn’t mental; it was in her muscles, her bones, the roots of her hair. Her gun was in her hand; she breathed with the forest—and there, she caught it: a flash of light beaming through the trees for a second, turning them into stripes of black, as Armand checked his damn watch again. The afterimages still ghostly pink before her eyes and her breath stinging her lungs, Joan ran towards where the light had been.

She was just thinking that she had set those explosives properly, she _had_ , when they went off.

The boom was distant, but it set the world to shuddering, shook the sky. Joan’s knees were against the ground before she knew what was happening, her gun falling from her hand and her ankle wrenching sideways. Her shoulder hit the dirt. There was no breath in her lungs.

The air smelt of burning—when she could inhale it again, the air smelt of burning.

The shadows were moving now, flickering; the light through the trees between the railway tracks and Joan’s current position was yellowish, ghostly. Fire. And she was on her side, thrown out of herself, scrabbling for a moment at the earth, wracked with the panicked thought _I’ll fall_ before she realised she already had.

The world slammed back into place, making her gasp, shake her head. She recovered her gun by the distant, filmy firelight, shoved herself up onto her feet, and cast about, not daring to yell—but there, just feet away, gripping a tree trunk, was Armand. Head bowed, one hand at his brow.

“Shit,” she said, running towards him, grabbing his jacket. Smoke was stinging the inside of her nose. “Come on. _Run_.” But he stumbled, and when his fingers came away from his forehead Joan saw the bloody smear below his hairline, the dazed expression in his firelit eyes.

Groaning, Joan shoved her shoulder under his arm, and said, “Keep your eyes open, keep moving with me,” but in French, despite Armand’s preference for English; she didn’t dare speak English so close to the tracks, where police might already be circling. 

The smoke was filtering through the trees, thicker now, the tang of burning only getting harsher in the air. She dragged him onwards, both of them moving in the same lurching step, her heart thudding an even, fast beat in her chest and her head bowed. Staring at her feet. Moving onwards. Fast as possible. No time to panic.

“Stop,” said Armand, his voice thick but hard, and Joan was about to tell him to shut up when she saw it too; the thin, swivelling beam of a torch, striping through the trees.

Her breath froze in her chest.

She heard the crunch of footsteps. Just one man, she judged, and she judged, too, that that was good; didn’t bother to analyse why, but her fingers were relaxed, confident, comfortable, on the grip of her gun. 

But it was alright. Maybe. Her hope sounding a thin, reedy note, Joan thought the footsteps were beginning to break twigs in a different direction, their noise receding; it was difficult to tell over the roar of the fire in the distance, the pounding of her own heart and the clamour of her breathing, but she thought so. 

 

Armand thought differently.

How could she have not noticed him unholstering his own pistol? The thought was inopportune, and swallowed all of Joan’s consciousness for one vital black second where she couldn’t act; where he broke from Joan’s grip. He lunged forwards, torchlight swung through the trees—

“No—”

She stumbled forwards, trying to drag him back as if that would have helped. There was the blue-white glare of the torch blinding her, the snap and crash of broken branches, a garbled yell in French and the sharp rattle of gunfire. Joan hauled in her breath, raised her pistol: shot once, shot again.

The torch fell to the ground, swinging its beam of light as it rolled.

Joan picked it up, switched it off, put it into the pack hanging at her hip, then put her shoulder under Armand’s arm again and helped him away from the dead man. “Come on,” she said. 

Ten minutes later, she felt secure enough to reholster her gun.

Armand didn’t speak. Neither did Joan. Distant voices disturbed them, the smell of smoke was still just about appreciable—but no one came close. They struggled onwards in the gleaming dark, until— 

“ _Quiet_ ,” Joan hissed, stopping them both, then sinking in relief at the sound of an owl-call echoing through the trees. “Léandre, you _insane_ —. What are you doing here?”

“Checking you’re not dead,” said Léandre, a dark shape slipping through the trees, holding out his hands. “Want any help?”

“Please. He’s concussed.”

“And you?”

“Fine,” Joan said, then remembered that she had just shot a man twice in the head—but she felt the same after remembering it. She blinked in the darkness. She felt fine.

“You coming?” Léandre asked, and Joan said, “Yes, of course,” hurrying with him in the dark; taking one of Armand’s arms but getting shaken off for her trouble. He was beginning to walk more steadily, but Joan still heard Léandre’s huffs of effort disturbing the silence.

They made it to the safehouse, a secluded farmhouse which stood square and black against the pale, starlit dark of the sky, leaking light through cracks in the curtains—even now, a sight which struck Joan as being alien, far from home. The full moon hung in the sky with a kind of weariness, as if unable any longer to turn a cheek; the night gleamed silver. Joan didn’t think about the good visibility offered by that kind of moon, but she felt herself not thinking about it, and it caused a kind of clenching ache in her chest, a pain so slow and gentle it was almost sweet.

As they pushed onwards, Joan saw more light spill from the door as it opened, heard the patter of feet, and recognised the silhouette, tall and sinuous, which was slipping fluidly as a shadow down the path towards them.

“ _Armand_ ,” Marie said when she reached them, not afraid but soothing, reaching out to take him from Léandre’s care. The orange light from the kitchen lit up her tawny hair, the curve of her bare shoulder—she was in her nightgown—but her face remained in shadow. Joan knew the look she wore, though: stolen from religious paintings, without the faintest suspicion of the hard, weary lines her brow naturally crumpled into when Armand wasn’t looking.

“I’m fine,” Armand muttered into her shoulder, leaning hard on her. Disguising a stumble as an embrace. Or maybe it was both, Joan thought, exhausted; who was she to know, to judge? These things happened in France. They rocked from foot to foot in the darkness, Marie’s slender form taking an improbable amount of Armand’s weight.

“He’s concussed,” Joan told her, when Marie had pulled apart from him to try and frown at his face. “Bandage his head, get some ice from the icebox, keep him talking. He’ll be fine, I think.”

Marie had been a nurse before she had been a spy. She nodded at Joan in the darkness and took Armand’s arm, leading him in. As Joan watched their silhouettes, she realised how Marie did it, made him lean upon her—it was that she pretended, all the while, to be leaning on him.

Léandre slumped against Joan’s side. “Oh,” he moaned, “ _lead_ me, Mselle Mercier.”

Joan elbowed him off, smiling but saying, “Not kind, Bouchard.”

“Neither is your great leader. Go on.” He nudged her forwards, so Joan sighed and started towards the front door, while he walked off in the direction of the outhouse.

Inside the kitchen, the heat was thick, welcome; there was no one else there, but a pot of stew was burbling atop the stove, spreading the smell of nameless meat through the sparse, clean room. The house belonged to Serge, and was occupied by an ever-changing variety of Resistance members. The British members of the network—SOE-trained agents—only used it as a base for sabotage. Joan had lodgings a few miles off, with Léandre and a woman sympathiser—more sympathetic, it had to be said, to Léandre than to Joan. 

She ladled stew into a bowl and slumped down at the hard-scrubbed wooden table, finally groaning—not having realised how much she ached until that moment. Her ankle suddenly flared with pain, too, and it was a moment before she could blink it all back and start eating—not feeling hungry but knowing that her body needed the fuel, and that she wouldn’t be able to think straight until she had it. It wasn’t as if she missed much from being unable to taste it; what meat had been in it had mostly been fished out by those who had returned earlier, leaving mostly sodden vegetables and thin broth.

She chewed, swallowed, frowned, sighed.

So: she had killed a man.

Well, she had killed people before, if indirectly; it wasn’t as if sabotage was sport, and she had so far been involved in three attacks on the railway, this last included. Explosions didn’t just damage metal and trees. She wasn’t stupid enough to believe anything so sanitised. But then it would be sheer stupidity, too, to argue that the distant responsibility for those distant deaths were anything like shooting somebody in the head.

She shovelled stew into her mouth, beginning to come back to herself—continuing not to feel anything much beyond exasperation with Armand and the impersonal satisfaction of having done a good job.

The door clattered, and Léandre came in, shutting out the night. “Didn’t put out anything for me?” he asked. “Why did I ever run off with you?”

Joan just grinned at him, chewing one of the few chunks of meat she had secured with her mouth open and watching him put out a bowl of stew for himself, inhaling the fumes with a low groan of pleasure despite everything. “I’m starving! You’ve stolen all the beef.”

“Trust me, it wasn’t beef.”

Léandre gave a groaning laugh. He was a small, expressively ugly man with a deep, pleasant voice, his thick black hair never neat and his mouth never still. Joan liked him. He was the younger son of M. Emile Bouchard, the old farmer whose house she—or Angeline Mercier, at least—had kept for just over a month—before it had become too difficult to avoid the police, and she and Léandre had escaped to anonymity under the pretence of running off together.

The table wobbled as Léandre set down his bowl of stew and two straight, chipped glasses half-filled with something dark, frothing, brown in colour, strong-smelling—hissing his disdain at her for neglecting to pour drinks. Joan swallowed a mouthful of her own stew and said, “Thanks. Léandre?”

“Yes?”

“I shot someone.”

Léandre paused a moment before digging into his stew, his brow furrowed—then he snorted, and took a mouthful before replying, taking the time to chew and swallow thoroughly. “Okay,” he said. “Is he dead?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well.” He picked up his glass, shrugged at her. “Don’t see what you’re worried about.”

“I’m not,” Joan sighed, and didn’t know how to explain that that was the worrying thing—so she just gulped down some of her drink, trying not to shudder at the taste but glad for the warmth it sparked in her belly after a few swallows. Then she started eating again. For a few minutes, the kitchen was silent but for the scrape of wooden spoons against bowls and the noise of chewing, and the creak of footsteps upstairs—the muted mumble of Marie and Armand’s voices.

Finally she had scraped the last of the stew from the bowl, and leant back, peeling off her jacket as she did so. It was Léandre’s; most of what she wore was Léandre’s, even down to the battered, thick-soled boots which she wore with three pairs of socks to stop them slipping on her feet, even though they were small for a man’s size.

Léandre put down his spoon, cleared his throat. “So,” he said. “When the hell are you getting rid of him?”

Joan closed her eyes, rubbed at her temple with two fingers. “Not my call to make. I’m a courier, not an organiser. So’s Marie, for that matter.”

“You can’t send a message back to your London friends?”

“I can, but it wouldn’t be a good idea.” She kept her voice quiet, calm, her eyes still closed. “Armand has connections who won’t answer to anyone else. Anyway, even if he was removed from the network, someone would have to organise it, and London wouldn’t stand for Marie stepping up to that. Nevermind it’s already what she does. They’d want a man.”

“You have a man. Paul. You talk about him.”

“He’s a wireless operator, Léandre. Can’t be connected to the rest of the network.”

“Hn.” Léandre took a drink, and the conversation resolved the way it always did; with him saying, “Armand’s a fool,” and Joan replying, “He’s scared.”

They rested in silence for a few more minutes. Joan’s legs ached; her neck ached. She was, however, pleased with herself: she had swallowed the familiar gut-clenching anxiety which came with the words _wireless operator_ with nary a blink. Of course, this wasn’t unusual—she could go through a hundred of those scared shocks a day, prompted by the sight of dark curls, or women with particularly long hands, or things much more innocuous: a cigarette held in a certain way, the taste of beetroot on her tongue. Her face never betrayed her. She was absently proud of that.

With her eyes still shut, Joan pulled one foot up to tug her bootlaces loose, then kicked off her boot; repeated the motions for the other. Léandre laughed at her. “I’m tired,” she remarked, opening one eye and then the other, raising her eyebrows, smiling at him.

“You shot a man,” he reminded her, and she winced; should have known he wouldn’t really take it so lightly. Before food, perhaps, yes, and before a drink, but now the stew and the greasy-textured homemade alcohol had settled him and he felt ready to talk. Maybe she shouldn’t have told him.

“Yes,” she said, sitting up, putting her elbows on the table and fixing him with a look. Her throat clicked. “I shot a man. Twice.”

“Didn’t get him the first time?”

“Just a habit from training.”

“Your first time killing someone like that.”

“Bouchard,” she said, raising her face up to his. “I’m fine. I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to question it. He would have killed me. Well, he would have arrested me, and I would have eventually been transported to Germany, where they would have killed me. So.”

Léandre had intelligent, dark eyes, and thick brows which were bent over them—when he frowned, his whole face furrowed rather than just his forehead. He looked at her for a long while, then nodded. “Alright.”

“Thank you.”

“No.” He shook his head, took a sip of wine, and reached for his tobacco and papers. Joan put her cheek against her hand and watched him roll a cigarette with an absent interest, having seen the ritual many times and finding the same kind of soothing quality in watching it as he did in carrying it out. It was reassuringly unglamourous, and of course Sherlock never rolled her own.

Joan’s eyes closed for a moment, lips twitching, but the moment passed quickly, and long before Léandre looked up from his rolling with a skinny cigarette in hand.

“Share,” Joan commanded in a desultory fashion, and Léandre lowered his eyes in a way which implied that, while he was much too tired to pour out one of his extravagantly submissive sighs of _oui, Mselle Mercier_ , his mock adoration was there in spirit.

He passed her the cigarette; she took a drag; she handed back the cigarette; he took a drag; he passed her the cigarette. They were slumped close together, both huddled about the same corner of the table. Above them, Armand’s voice raised suddenly, English again, “...fucking _point_ of—” but the noise faded quickly, hushed by Marie’s murmurs. Léandre’s knee knocked against Joan’s.

“Translate?” he said, nudging the cigarette gently from her fingers. Joan sighed, and translated, letting it go free, and shaking her head when next he offered it. “Well,” he said, puffing thoughtful plumes of smoke across the table, “what do you think?”

“What do I think is the point?”

“Mm.”

She grinned at him. “Making the collaborationist bastards uncomfortable, obviously. Come on, Bouchard, don’t pull that—” his mouth was tugging up into a smile, laughter starting in his throat “—the world-weary revolutionary—gone cynical in your old age—everyone knows you’re an idealist.”

“It’s fair,” he said, “it’s a fair charge.” His cigarette was smoking in one hand; the other he raised, cupping Joan’s cheek.

His thumb brushed her lower lip. He leaned in, kissed her, his mouth warm and his moustache prickly.

Joan, with her eyes shut, gave him three seconds, her lips together, unmoving. Then she leaned away, and took his warm, rough hand from where it lay against her cheek. She put it flat on the table, with hers over it. Squeezed. “Sorry,” she said, and took her fingers away, leaning back in her chair. Léandre looked at her for a few minutes, then coughed, nodded, sat back slightly, picked up his drink again.

It was only a few seconds before he was sitting up straighter, smile incorrigible once more. “The indomitable Mselle Mercier strikes again, of course,” he said, raising his glass to her, and Joan tried to smile—forced herself to smile. She didn’t feel insulted, nor angry; just tired, she thought. But there was something stuck in the back of her throat, impeding the passage of air.

Léandre must have seen something of that strangulation showing on her face. He put down his glass without drinking. “I’ve offended you,” he said, his cheeks pallid, and Joan shook her head.

“It’s not you,” she said. “It’s—it’s really, really not you.”

**PARIS  
** FRANCE, ZONE OCCUPÉE  
25th OCTOBER 1942 

The suitcase had weighed her down from Douai to the Gare du Nord, and now as Sherlock trudged forwards, part of the crowd filtering out onto the Rue de Maubeuge—slowed by the occasional searches, women in one line and men in another—her whole arm ached with the weight. Of course, she couldn’t afford to wince or adjust it too often; couldn’t show what a strain it was, or how her aching fingers, sweat-slippery on the cracked leather grip, were stiff from holding on so slightly to it.

Nor was there a point in trying to avoid the checkpoint. They were a fact of life under Occupation—a fact of life familiar to Victoire Renaud, who, while not a Parisian, attempted to yawn with them in the face of these inconveniences, even while she looked furtively about at the crowd and the clatter of the railway terminus. Sherlock Holmes might be running on very little sleep and the remaining influences of the hot toddy she had downed before jumping from a black Lysander into the blacker night, might have an aching wrist because of the wireless set she was carrying in her suitcase, but Victore Renaud was well-rested, well-mannered, well-prepared to stay with her infirm aunt Baptistine and offer what help was necessary—and would madame care to see her papers?

As it happened, madame didn’t care to; Sherlock, or rather Victoire, smiled at her, and her eyes passed over her— “La prochaine!” —to the next woman.

They called them _des souris grises_ in Paris, Sherlock knew, _grey mice_ ; German women whose dark, shapeless uniforms were much mocked by Parisiennes doing their best with a leather shortage and fashion houses gone out of business—striding through the streets in shoes with wooden heels, and hats broad enough to defy Occupation, war and everything else. So Victoire tightened her mouth a little, and thought to herself that at least she didn’t have a chin like that, and Sherlock felt vaguely relieved, and both of them stepped out into Paris—and both of them thought, _this again!_ —because it was still Paris after all.

The October sunlight wasn’t warm, but it was insistent, had a hard quality to it as it beat down upon the bright awnings and the painted doors: pink, green, blue. Along the sides of the streets were ranged the same narrow, smart buildings, pinning the bright sky in place with their peaked roofs. Sherlock didn’t stop to breathe in or stare—she had a contact to make—but as she hurried through the streets, senses assaulted by detail, she had to acknowledge an uneasy surprise at the fact that life seemed to be carrying on.

Well, and what had she expected? Paris was changed, certainly—but still recognisable. Some of the change was of the kind which had come over London—Paris, too, had achieved a dusty, starved-down air, the quietness of war; the sense that the saccharine brightness of propaganda colours was sweet but unfulfilling, like fairy food dissolving on the tongue.

Other changes were new: checkpoints, yellow stars, and always papers, papers, papers. Paris ran on papers now; on forms, on stamps—at least, it clearly ran on something other than decent bread, Sherlock thought, catching a waft of scent on the air: bread, but to her nose baked with ground chestnuts in place of flour.

She hurried onwards, drowning in flashes of scent and streaks of wild colour. The streets rang with the clatter of women’s heels against cobbles; there were very few motorcars, and those which she did pass were German.

Her own heels were slightly different, she realised with a lurch of horror—the hinges at the centre of the sole which sought to make up for using wood in place of rubber stiffer than everybody else’s, newer—but _no one else_ , she reminded herself, would pay attention to it.

Sherlock walked on. She knew where she was supposed to make her first contact; had known for months. It was a sharp stabbing shock to realise she was about to actually, finally _do_ something.

There was sweat between her collar and her skin, making her neck slippery.

As she carried on, she began looking up at the signposts with a careful, frowning air—noting how most of them had newer signs attached, with directions in German, but not seeming surprised, and focusing on the French. She let her step falter as she came to a crossroads, feet tight together, suitcase swinging uneasily by her side.

It was quiet. A carthorse stamped uneasily beside an exhausted-looking shop with propaganda in the windows but no produce on display, though it promised a list of daily essentials—bread, eggs, butter—in faded lettering above its door. The horse’s ribs were more easily legible than the signage. A fly buzzed—Sherlock heard it from across the street—and the horse flicked its tail once, unenthusiastically, then gave up.

On one corner, two men in their fifties, in grey, their caps pulled down low, grumbled unintelligibly to each other in voices less distinct than the whine of the flies and smoked cigarettes with no tobacco in them. Sherlock smelt burnt grass, burnt thyme. Across from them, a woman in a black overcoat had stopped, her shoulder against a building, one foot up—trying to extract a pebble from the hinge of her articulated wooden sole.

When the woman straightened, Sherlock saw the sign she had been told to look for—a worn out daisy in the buttonhole of her coat—but it wasn’t necessary. She could recognise the difference between wooden soles crafted in France, and wooden soles knocked up in a workshop SOE’s team of forgers, cobblers, tailors.

“Excuse me,” said Sherlock. “I’m looking for the Rue Ghislaine; do you know where it is?”

“Yes,” said the woman, whose name wasn’t Georgette, or Navigator, but for whom the appellations would serve, “you look like you’ve already gone past it.” 

It was the answering phrase to Sherlock’s; and as Sherlock _ahh_ ’ed her irritation, rocking back on Victoire’s wooden heels a little, Georgette-also-Navigator inserted her own code phrase: “You have to turn by Pape’s cafe or you’ll never find it. I have a friend who lives there, Baptistine Cammaerts.”

Later, Sherlock would marvel at the absurdity of the passwords they exchanged; who, in Occupied Paris, would so easily chat about the people they kept company with, especially when Mme Cammaerts was—as Sherlock soon discovered—known for her black market contacts? But all Sherlock said then was, “I’m her niece,” and all she thought about was how strange it was to finally say the words she had been rehearsing for months as the exchange which would start her first contact. They were more shapes than sentences, verbal locks and keys. “You know her?”

“Certainly. I see the resemblance between you now.”

And that was that: passwords exchanged, code-phrases done with, and the last of the locks tumbled open. Contact made. Sherlock breathed, flicked her eyes cursorily over Georgette. She was pale, dark-haired, with mirthful eyes and a pointed chin with a pink scratch on it like a cat had swiped her. That, and her oversized coat, made her pixie-ish, like a wholesome urchin from a bad novel. She looked younger than Sherlock. 

“People say that,” Sherlock said brusquely. Then, knowing that she had no choice but to continue to contact, added, “What cafe did you say to turn at, sorry?” though she had already seen Pape’s cafe; had missed the turn intentionally in order to meet Georgette.

“You’re so lost,” said Georgette, smiling slowly and a little pityingly—holding out her arm. Her elf-face looked older when she raised her eyebrows. Sherlock prickled, then wondered what was wrong with her; hadn’t she twittered, fluttered, sniffled often enough at home cover her own tracks? Why should she feel embarrassed to play stupid now, when it mattered most? “Come on. I’ll take you there, and Mme Cammaerts will reward me in countless favours for rescuing her niece.”

Sherlock took her arm, putting her fingers at the inside of Georgette’s elbow. “Thank you,” she said, however much she didn’t want to.

“My name’s Gigi, by the way.” Sherlock gave her a brief, blank look, surprised that she was referring to her cover name so quickly; Georgette either misinterpreted or pretended to, and laughed; “Alright, _Virginie_ , but please: Gigi.”

“Victoire,” said Sherlock softly, and allowed herself to be steered back the way she had come, around the corner she had already noted, down to the Rue Ghislaine.

It was a scraped-down street typical of the _bainlieu_ —really only notable for its quietness. Everything seemed to creak, but on the edge of hearing. A precarious, hushed emptiness. Most of windows were shuttered, giving the buildings a blind look.

“Come on,” Georgette chivvied, her smile girlish, tugging Sherlock gently along. Again there was that flare of irritation at being taken for malleable, leadable, lost. Sherlock pushed it down, reminded herself that Georgette hadn’t met her yet; and that for that matter, she hadn’t met Georgette. Victoire had met Gigi, that was all. “Not much to gawk at anyway. This is where Mme Cammaerts lives.” 

They had halted before a boarded-up shop with a name flaking off its front: just visible was the word _tabac_ , but all further information had been worn away. Georgette first went around to a door by the side, rattling it enthusiastically for a moment, then frowning, stepping back: “Perhaps she’s not—”

“She’s in,” said Sherlock firmly. When Georgette gave her a curious look, she smiled so hard her face hurt and said, “I know my aunt Baptistine’s habits.”

Under her breath, Georgette breathed, “And yet you don’t know her house,” in tones of _don’t get cocky_. That, Sherlock supposed, was Georgette and not Gigi, and thank God: Georgette was the more likable of the two. But before she could respond—everything today seemed to be happening before she could respond—there was a great rattling overhead as if of a movement of birds. A number of pigeons had in fact been dislodged from a window sill, and erupted fluttering into the air, but the noise was that of shutters behind thrown open.

A woman with white hair tumbling out from under a cap and a strong Provençal accent stuck her head out of the window, hands gripping the sill, to shout: “What do you want?”

“It’s me,” Georgette called back, and Mme Cammaerts harrumphed, the wrinkled folds of her strong-boned face arranging themselves into something slightly less sour. “And your niece! I stopped her getting lost.”

“Ha! Victoire, come up. Bring that good for nothing girl with you.” 

A bunch of keys tied with twine were thrown down to them—Mme Cammaerts making some noises about her joints, how she couldn’t be up and down those stairs when there were young things to do that for her—and Georgette let them in, closing the door behind her.

The stairs were dusty, creaking, airless; when she reached the landing, Sherlock pursed her lips and opened the door to the flat proper with the narrow-eyed focus she usually reserved for crime scenes—the ones she got into, at least.

Mme Cammaerts’ parlour was notable for the blast of arid heat which stung Sherlock’s face the moment she stepped in, making her blink and grimace. A stove burned in the corner, next to which the crooked white shape of Mme Cammaerts was hunched. It was dim—even dark, after the hard sunlight of the street; the shutters were already closed again, and no lamps burned, so that the only light which could intrude lay in thin orange bars along the floor.

“Idiot girls,” Mme Cammaerts snapped the moment they got in, heaving herself to her feet and struggling over to them, snatching the keys from Georgette’s hand with a harsh jangle of metal, lifting them up close to her squinting, myopic eyes as if Georgette might have swapped them between the street and the hot little room. “Coming here in the middle of the day—”

Georgette rolled her eyes. “Did you want your _niece_ snuck in under the cover of darkness?”

“Your room’s upstairs,” Mme Cammaerts snapped at Sherlock, ignoring Georgette as she returned to her chair by the stove. There was a pot atop it, and it filled the room with the stench of chicory root slowly stewing; when the old woman had focused her attention on it, and seized the end of a wooden spoon to prod irritably at its depths, there seemed to be no distracting her.

Sherlock, who had been plagued by images of Aunt Baptistine as some red-cheeked matron prone to lewd jokes and tears over milk rations, was unutterably relieved, and demonstrated the fact by sniffing disdainfully before she swept off to mount the stairs and discover her room, suitcase now producing a steady jolt of pain through her right arm every time she took a step.

Georgette followed her. Sherlock held the door open for her and cast her a look; cool, vaguely interested, vaguely expectant. Georgette didn’t react, and Sherlock turned her gaze upon the room instead.

Not enough sleep. Too much whiskey. Felt a little like Nembutal—like she was walking through bright treacle, colours blazing and then blurring. She felt excessively sensitive—in the style of scientific instruments—picking up readings from too far away, corrupting relevant data. She was distracted, for instance, by the little knife notches on the sill, carved by someone with a penknife and nothing to do; by similar scratches on the door frame, marking off the years in centimeters grown—so that before she knew what colour the wallpaper was or how the light bled in through the shutters, she knew the room had once belonged to a small girl and a smaller boy. Previous occupants?

Yes; no; in some way. She was looking at Baptistine Cammaerts herself, Sherlock realised; the marks she had left as a small girl growing up in this room. And yet Mme Cammaerts’ accent was pure Provence, and not Parisian at all.

If she had never met Joan Watson, Sherlock would have turned back there, rerouted her thoughts—but her mouth twitched, knuckles brushing now the faded notches, oh, sixty years old? But still there. And she remembered that accents could be deceitful, could be unintentional, could be complex remnants of childhood attempts to fit in; anything.

From the height of the marks, the two heights had ceased to be measured when the boy was around five, the girl eleven. In the same year. Sherlock’s brow creased.

“Don’t look like that,” Georgette remarked. “It’s a good enough room, and your _aunt_ isn’t going to charge you rent.”

“I’m not looking like anything,” Sherlock said, and closed the door, blinking a few times as she focused on what the room actually looked like.

“Keep it that way. That’s good,” Georgette said, raising her eyebrows—smiling—holding out her hand. Sherlock only saw it from the corner of her eye. “I’m Georgette. As you know.”

The room was small; slightly cooler than Mme Cammaerts’ parlour but still hot from the stove below. Rustic, in some ways, with the narrow bed and handstitched coverlet seeming to some part of Sherlock’s mind like those of a Victorian housemaid, really—ascetic and old. The walls were papered, but faded; the window was closed and shuttered. 

Sherlock turned, and transferred her case to her left hand so that she could take Georgette’s waiting hand, giving it a brief, hard shake. “Reine,” she said. “As you know.” 

Then she turned, and dropped her suitcase on the bed, rolling her right shoulder back with a hard click. It felt good to move again—not to hold herself tightly pinched in as Victoire did, elbows at her sides and knees forever together.

“Mme Cammaerts is a little blind,”Georgette said, speaking French even though they were alone. “She keeps the shutters closed for her privacy, because she doesn’t need the light, but you can open them.”

“Very blind,” said Sherlock. “She’s also an independent widow, comparatively rich, well-known in black-market circles as someone who can put you in touch with people who have what you need. I doubt that stove ever goes out. For a history, she was uprooted from her home in Provence, lost a younger brother at an early age—not that that’s exactly current, but it is relevant if we’re discussing her life—” Why had she said it? Well, because it was _true_ — “Should there be a sign saying _Resistance activity within_ on the door, just to complete the picture?”

Georgette opened her mouth, but Sherlock was already waving a hand, shaking her head; that burst of irritation out of her, she felt better, like she had let out a long-held breath. She wasn’t angry at Georgette, really. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ll manage.”

“You’re confident,” said Georgette.

“Yes.”

“Is this your first—”

“Is it the done thing to ask that?” Again, that snake-strike stress response. Georgette smiled. She still looked fairyish, with her delicate, pallid features and her glistening brown eyes; perhaps more so now that she standing was in that dusty semi-shadow, the kind of uneasy gloom only found in darkened rooms outside of which the sun still burned and the day was still hurrying onwards.

“No,” she said. “I was just curious. And that means yes, doesn’t it.”

Sherlock sniffed, looked away. “Tell me the state of things.”

“Well, there’s a war on.”

“I have had a _long day_.”

“I’m glad to see you,” Georgette said, and the tone of her voice—finally frank, tired, worn to the bone—made Sherlock cease inspecting the patchworked coverlet and look at her once more. She shrugged coolly under Sherlock’s scrutiny, oversize coat slipping about her shoulders a little, mouth pinched. “We just lost our other wireless operator. Congratulations; you’re officially the only radio link between Professor and London.”

Slowly, Sherlock turned more properly to face her, shoulders lowering. “Tell me,” she said, her voice smoothing out to neutrality. “In detail.”

Outside, there was the sound of a bicycle skimming the cobbles, rattling by; a stray dog barked. Paris under Occupation, under a hard, broad October sky, bowed its bright head and gritted its teeth. Georgette told her. 

A man whose name wasn’t really Yves, but for whom ‘Yves’ would have to do, had been their lone W/T since Alain had been captured; a good sort, Georgette said, and she knew because she had been his courier, had kept him connected with the rest of the group. He had been captured ten days ago—coming out of a shop of all things, not even transmitting. The rest of the network was only now beginning to let out their breath again. He was reckless; she hastened to establish that. It wasn’t, she explained, a matter of the whole network being blown. It was just that Yves had been reckless. He hadn’t moved around enough; hadn’t ever seen the point in caution.

“But you won’t do that,” Georgette concluded. “I’ll keep you updated on different safehouses, places you can use to transmit. You’ll move around.” Sherlock, who ached from moving around already, stared thoughtfully at the battered leather case on her bed. “Promise me you’ll listen to my advice, Reine.”

Sherlock looked to her with a start, and said, “Yes. Obviously.”

“Good.” Georgette nodded. “Good. Well.”

“Who relocated from Picardy?” Sherlock asked, dropping down onto her bed and bending up her knee to unfasten one shoe, then the other—giving the inquiry a lazy tone. “English, I mean.”

Georgette, prompted by Sherlock’s apparent relaxation, shoved her hands into her pockets and gave an expressive sigh, shrugging. “All of us. Me, Marcel, Yves, Professor. There’s no one else from Baker Street out here. Well, aside from you.”

“Aside from me,” Sherlock echoed, cracking her neck—sniffing. Her lip hitched up for a moment. “ _Professor_. You use his callsign, not his codename?”

Georgete looked at her and laughed, shaking her head—as if Sherlock had missed something. Sherlock, reaching over to unfasten the clasps of her suitcase, paused and looked up at her, but all Georgette said was, “Go downstairs and talk to Mme Cammaerts, Reine. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“One thing.”

Georgette turned obligingly.

“What happened to Yves’ wireless set?” Sherlock asked. Georgette shook her head.

“Captured,” she said. “Wasn’t in any of his safe flats. Sorry. What you brought might be the only one in Paris, for all we know.”

With that she left. Sherlock watched the door for a few moments after she went, and then fell back down against the mattress, head sinking into the pillow and eyes closing. She breathed. Her head ached, like her brain was pressing against her skull. Everything felt thick, cluttered, greasy.

She should be thinking of Corentin. Of cover. Of her making her first sked. Of whether Mme Cammaerts’ home was safe. But a single question had wormed its way into her mind, and was coiling around all her plans, all her carefully-accumulated data, hissing _me first_. It was just what Georgette had said about Yves having been taken while coming out of a shop—it stuck in Sherlock’s brain, complained when she tried to turn away from it.

Had Yves the wireless operator—and it was wrong to think of him as dead, from a purely factual standpoint, because unless he had taken his L-tablet by now he was undoubtedly still alive, and undoubtedly beyond help—had Yves been discovered, or betrayed?

Sherlock opened her eyes and found the ceiling grey and cracked above her. She flopped a hand over the side of the bed, “Joan, pass—”

Of course, Joan didn’t hear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merci, merci. Welcome to part two, in which shit goes down. The next chapter will be posted on Monday 2nd December, which is also the beginning of Eighth Week, which is my last week of term. Because there's a lot of stuff happening in upcoming chapters which I want to finetune, I'm not sure if I'll revert back to weekly posting over the holidays, but I'll definitely review it; in term time, at least, fortnightly has been way more doable, and hopefully not too much of a bore.
> 
> Not too many notes this time: just that the descriptions of Paris in this chapter are inspired by these [propaganda pictures](http://120pearls.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/propaganda-images-of-occupied-france-agfacolor-color-film/), which I really recommend taking a look at. The context given on that page is also pretty interesting.


	18. Three Blind Mice

**PARIS  
** **FRANCE, ZONE OCCUPÉE**  
 **17TH NOVEMBER 1942**

The bicycle had cost her two cigarettes and a promise she’d ask her aunt Baptistine whether she knew anyone who could get their hands on eggs—but the joke was on the man who had bartered it off to her, Sherlock thought. She had taken most of the tobacco out of the cigarettes on her first day in France, and if Baptistine Cammaerts knew how to procure eggs, then she would be procuring eggs for herself first of all.

Now the bike’s wheels jumped and shuddered along the cobbles, weaving through pedestrians, prompting grumbles and the occasional, “Watch where you’re going!” which Sherlock ignored entirely. It was a cool, sharp morning, especially with the wind rushing past her—especially as she swung around a corner and immediately launched herself down a steep decline. The bike pitched forwards with a gorgeous weightless lurch; Sherlock took her feet off the spinning pedals, grabbed onto her hat. She would have grabbed onto the enormous sackcloth bag in the basket in front, had not it already been tied down for precisely this reason.

The street streaked by her to the deafening, tinny rat-a-tat of bicycle wheels, wind nipping her cheeks. The bike juddered and rattled along at a bouncing speed which was enough to make her teeth crack together on the harder jolts. She caught the smell of chicory, chestnut, herbal cigarettes which didn’t contain a scrape of tobacco; when she hit flat terrain again and the momentum of her descent carried her forwards, she had to wrench the handlebars to the side in order to avoid crashing through a line of people waiting to present their ration cards outside a shop advertising _BEURRE—OEUFS—FROMAGES_ —like hell!

Butter—eggs—cheese—they could live in hope, Sherlock thought, and pushed onwards, standing up on her pedals to put more force behind the bike. 

She hadn't been in Paris long, but she felt like she had fallen into the rhythm of day to day life easily, working as the active hand in Mme Cammaerts’ black market affairs. Now, she was beginning to sound out the deeper thrums, the political vibrations, which spread through the underbelly of the city.

A wolf-whistle cut through the air. Sherlock sneered as she careened about a corner and finally braked—and slammed her feet on the ground, too, because two cigarettes and a promise to ask about eggs could buy a frame and two wheels, but decent brakes were too much to expect.

She had stopped outside a flagging, tired-looking white building which advertised rooms for rent in a handwritten notice on the door. One hand still gripping the handlebars of her bicyle she knocked, called, “C’est Victoire!” and let herself in—pushing the bicycle into the darkened hallway rather than leaving it outside; in this neighbourhood, there was no point risking it. “Baptistine Cammaerts’ niece?”

A small figure emerged from the shadows: a girl of about nine in a much-darned smock, her face mistrustful. Sherlock blinked, and then nodded at her. “Is your mother home?”

“She’s in the kitchen.”

“Good.” Sherlock grasped the bag in her bicycle’s basket, and pulled from it a smaller netting sack: potatoes, still earthy. “Tell her Mme Cammaerts’ friend got these for her, and sends his thanks for the flour.” The child looked at her dubiously, so Sherlock raised an eyebrow, shook the potatoes at her and said, “I hope you’re not waiting for the end of the war.”

The girl grabbed the bag from her, pattered off; Sherlock lounged against the wall, judged the time, and made herself wait—all the while longing for a cigarette. It wasn’t long until the girl returned, her bare feet tapping lightly on the floorboards.

“Mummy says,” _maman dit_ ; the girl had a puckered Parisian diction heightened by an obvious haughty pride in being the one to look after the stranger, “that I’m to bring you to the attic.”

“Then,” said Sherlock, picking up her bag from the bike’s basket and slinging it over her shoulder, feeling the weight of the wireless set shift within it, “you had better bring me to the attic, hadn’t you?”

They set off; up and up and up winding steps, until the little girl stopped at the top landing—and pointed up at a slightly discoloured square on the ceiling; a trapdoor. A ladder rested against one wall. “Alright,” Sherlock said, “give me an hour.”

As she glanced up from her watch she noted the girl’s hungry stare. “What,” she said, nonplussed. And then, “Oh, the watch. I had to sell a tooth for it. Leave, or I’ll show you where I pulled it out.”

The girl gasped, not without some horrified pleasure, and her bare feet patted gently on the stairs as she hurried away. Sherlock set up the ladder, vaguely amused, and adjusted how the bag hung on her shoulder so that she could climb up into the attic, and there prepare to transmit.

It was a tiny space, cramped and thick with dust, but with brightness blaring in through a row of skylights, slanting hard yellow shafts of light across the floor. The first thing Sherlock did was take, from the huge sackcloth bag, the boxy cracked leather suitcase which contained her set and everything else she needed in order to transmit—a toolkit, a notebook, a pencil, paper, matches.

She was early; her sked didn’t start for another twenty minutes. That was according to plan. It gave her time to do what she had done with all of the safehouses, hiding places and bolt holes to which Georgette had so far directed her—investigate.

She took in the dust which lay thick on every flat surface of the tiny attic. All in order; all more than a fortnight old, which was in keeping with what she knew of the circumstances of Yves’ capture. No one had been up here. She could have asked the girl or her _maman_ , but the dust was a much more reliable witness than human memory.

Slowly, Sherlock crouched down, and started to feel along the cracks between the floorboards.

Was she getting distracted from the question of why Corentin had died, and why Edith Whistler hadn’t made her first flight?

Not if she trusted herself, no. And she—

The floorboards creaked under her fingers, rendering it pointless to finish the thought.

Sherlock gripped, and pulled.

The boards popped free, a splinter embedding itself in one of her fingers and a puff of dust erupting into the air, then hanging there. Sherlock didn’t so much ignore these baser physical realities as completely fail to notice them. Her attention was locked onto what nestled in the hollow which had been hidden beneath the boards: a small, tattered black suitcase, looking wonderfully clerkish and out of place in its dusty hiding place.

She grabbed it by the handle—a cockroach fled the black leather, skittering off into the deeper dark beneath the floorboards—and pulled it up, then with a noisy crack snapped open the catches. Smiled—thinly, with pleasure but no surprise.

There was a wireless set within.

 _Of course_ her first message back to Baker Street had been a request to know whether Yves had transmitted anything since the date of his capture, which would imply that the Germans had captured his set alongside him, and were forcing him to transmit. Purely a security concern, really. So she had phrased it, at least.

When the answer had been _no_ , her immediate suspicions had only been affirmed. Yves had been caught coming out of a shop, not dragged away while transmitting—and he had been reckless, most importantly. What did reckless wireless operators do?

They didn’t move around enough—and they didn’t keep a close watch on their sets. They left them hanging around.

Sherlock’s fingertips travelled, now, over the face of the radio, then dipped down into the spaces between set and case, checking it for damage. It seemed to be intact, and there were still, too, usable parts in its spares box, and an complete toolkit—not to mention a non-regulation screwdriver which Yves must have bartered for while still free. Even Yves’ notebook and pencil were still there, and his matches.

It was, in other words, worth its weight in gold—or perhaps in tobacco, given that tobacco was currently more valuable. But that wasn’t why Sherlock wanted it.

On the off-chance, Sherlock opened the notebook, but there was nothing in it; nearly all the pages were torn out. That was as it should be. Wireless operators could take notes while they transmitted, but the moment they were off the air they had to be burnt. The need for the destruction of documents was drilled into them.

So Sherlock dropped the notebook and lifted the radio from the case, setting it on the floor. Then she returned her attention to the suitcase, sweeping her hands along the inside panels.

Her focus was liquid—unhurried but coursing forwards, all her movements swift and firm. Her eyelashes were vibrating against her cheeks, her hands steady.

Why would a wireless operator be arrested while coming out of a shop? Why wouldn’t the Gestapo, if they were aware of his face, his name, his cover, simply wait until he was in front of his set, taking him, his equipment, and possibly a few sympathisers in the same swoop?

Because the Gestapo hadn’t found him; had only received a tip-off, not a comprehensive dossier of information. Yves hadn’t been discovered by the Germans; he had been thrown to them.

By whom? And why?

There was a line of stitches just beneath one of the original inner seams of the suitcase. Sherlock saw it in one of those pupil-dilating surges of realisation, blooming in her brain. _Oh_. 

Rough against her fingers. Little ridges. Tiny. The sewing was of a surgical quality. Surgical and permanent. This was a hiding place, not a storage solution. Whatever it hid…

Sherlock pressed down with her fingertips against the padded inner wall, and felt something crinkle.

The next few moments were rapid, passed with a blink: she snapped open her own suitcase, grabbed her knife from where it was wedged between the radio and the case, and slit the lining of Yves’ suitcase, then dropped the knife to work the folded pages out of their hiding place.

She rose to her feet as she unfolded them, held them up. Fanned them like playing cards. The sunlight splashed across the disjointed, jumbled letters scrawled over the translucent, grainy paper. Code. 

Sherlock’s eyes scanned the lines, lips parted. She blinked once—a grid flashed before her eyes—twice—letters shifting, relocating, with a metallic thud which resonated through her brain—three times, and understood.

“Oh, _Yves_.”

It was a low groan. She dropped back to her knees, and from her own suitcase she snatched a pencil, a wad of paper, started to scrawl down the plaintext in block capitals, starting with the first word which had become clear to her:

PROFESSOR

—scratching, marking, her hand working and her brain forcibly kept back, snapping on the end of its leash, her shoulders tight and rounded and her jaw clenched. No speculation, just the transfer of letters to numbers and back again—an almost surgical rearrangement.

It wasn’t a clever encryption; just a poem code, the same kind that every agent used. It could have been broken by anyone with a good head for anagrams and a basic idea of what to look for; broken even faster by someone who could guess what poem it was based on.

And yet it wasn’t a bad choice. Because Yves had made the code to be broken. More than that; he had made the code to be broken by wireless operators.

 _Three blind mice. Three blind mice. See how they run. See how they run._ —and what wireless operator who had received even a day of training could forget _that_ ; the rhyme they had to transmit over and over to practice their wrist action, their use of acronyms and prosigns, their accuracy?

Sherlock’s breath came quick, disturbing the dust on the floorboards— _they all run after the farmer’s wife_ —and the attic was full of the sound of her pencil scratching and squeaking against the paper— _who cut off their tails with a carving knife_ —until finally her palms were flat against the floor and she was staring down at the plaintext of the message.

YOUR ENTIRE NETWORK IS COMPROMISED.  
THE GERMANS HAVE AN INFORMANT: MORIARTY.  
IT MIGHT BE ONE OF THEM OR IT MIGHT BE ALL OF THEM:  
PROFESSOR. NAVIGATOR. SCIENTIST.

— _did you ever see such a sight in your life as three blind mice?_

Professor; Navigator; Scientist. The callsigns of the three other SOE agents in the network.

Sherlock threw down her pencil, and with the words still burning in her brain, reached for her suitcase and the pack of matches which was inside it.

First rule: burn all documents.

There was no fireplace; she’d have to burn each page separately to keep the flame manageable. She struck a match, the crack and hiss sounding loud in the attic, and picked up the first page of Yves’ notes.

And then she hesitated, breath caught, it seemed, between her teeth—until the match burnt down to the quick and the flame licked her fingers and she shook it out. Dropped the blackened stick. Let out a quiet, frustrated mutter of, “ _Damn_.”

It was evidence, for God’s sake—and a spy might burn all the evidence she could lay her hands upon, but Sherlock was a detective.

She knew she was late for her sked before checking her watch, though she checked it anyway for the sake of knowing the exact details. Six minutes past her appointed start-time. Fine. She launched into action, setting up her radio with a deft, practiced ease, glad to have something to do with her hands so that her mind could sort through the facts:

—that Yves had known he was going to be captured, had planted the W/T set, the message—

—that _it might be one of them or it might be all of them_ —

— _Moriarty_ —

The radio crackled to life in her headphones as she tuned in, working dials until she could catch the tail end of a series of dits and dahs. Might be one of them or it might be all of them. Her pencil was in her hand again, the end poised over a blank sheet of notepaper. The Morse went from her ear to her hand, didn’t bypass her brain. 

_KN_ … She was being called. _KNIGHT_ …

Might be one of them or it might be all of them. Might be all of them. Did you ever see such a sight in your life. Her pencil, again, scratching, scraping; then she dropped it, took her key between thumb and forefinger and started to work it—because she knew, with a sudden rush of confident mental light, what message she had to send.

**CHABRIS  
** **FRANCE, ZONE NON-OCCUPÉE**  
 **22ND NOVEMBER 1942**

“I don’t actually care if your Resistance friends don’t like me,” Joan said, shoving the cigarette back into Léandre’s hand. “I mind _somewhat_ , yes, if they’re not going to listen to what I have to say about planting explosives.”

“My Resistance friends, huh,” Léandre said, sticking the cigarette in his mouth and then pouring smoke out of his flared nostrils, “my _Resistance friends_ —do you think this is a social group?”

Joan snatched the disintegrating cigarette back out of his hand. It was almost smoked down to the quick, hard to hold without burning either fingers or lips. Hot in the hand. “No,” she said, cramming it between her lips nonetheless and sucking down what smoke she could before pushing it back at him; “no, I don’t. But they act like it is.”

“They’re allowed to,” Léandre said, and then, “ _Merde_!” —turning away, hurling the last glowing pieces of the cigarette into the darkness. The embers winked once, and faded. A few seconds later, Léandre, his voice lowered, stifled at the back of his throat, said, “It’s their country. You’re _visiting_.”

“I know,” Joan sighed. When Léandre remained silent, and when his silence remained thick and tight and swollen with words Joan knew he wanted to say but couldn’t, she reached out, found his arm in the dark, gripped for a moment. “I _know_.”

“Yeah,” Léandre said, finally. His voice was sodden, clogged. Joan pretended not to hear, and was privately, wearily glad that his face was in darkness. She took her hand away.

They were sitting on a low stone wall a little way from the house they were lodging in; trespassing, probably, on someone’s land, but in the thick of the night it hardly seemed to matter.

“Do you,” Joan said, “I know you’re in France, but you’re not where you grew up. Do you ever,” but she stopped herself, lifted her head; there was a light floating closer to them, bobbing silently in the dark.

All thoughts of trying to speak with Léandre about what they never spoke about— _home_ -ness and _far-away_ -ness—were immediately laughable. Joan started thinking about cover.

Young lovers, she told herself. She slipped her hand into Léandre’s, pressed closer to him, like any woman caught in the middle of a private conversation with her lover might, both shying towards and shying away from him—defiant, wary, seeking comfort—out after curfew, but who could blame them—

“You look cosy,” called Marie, and Joan’s shoulders slumped. She dropped Léandre’s hand. Léandre started to laugh, the slow, whooping, jerking laugh of someone stumbling into hilarity by way of terror; Joan felt him slump against her shoulder, and ended up laughing along with him, her palm against her forehead—her lungs burning, feeling as if they were spasming in her chest with every involuntary gasp.

Marie was carrying a torch, but when she drew close she switched it off, leaving bright after-images floating in the darkness between them. “What are you doing here?” Joan asked, trying to project a whisper. There was the creak of bicycle wheels; Marie was wheeling her bike alongside her.

“I was in the area,” Marie said when she was stopped before them. Her voice was smooth, slippery as the rest of her; words elegantly bent into shape. Joan could hear that she was smiling, but Marie’s smiles were odd things—not always quite timely, and not always explicable. Probably, though, this one was wry. “Staying a few miles away. I was going to call at the house, but then I saw your cigarette end.”

“Okay,” said Joan, “why?”

It wasn’t unusual that Marie should be in the area. She, like Joan, ran courier for the network, carrying messages to and from different agents and outposts, facilitating dead and live drops and ensuring communication between the disparate elements of the circuit. If Joan had a reputation for never making threats, then Marie’s reputation was no less alarming, though in a different way; it was said that she had once cycled for fourteen hours straight to warn a wireless operator of the fact that one of his dead-drop locations was blown.

The story was admirable, certainly—but it didn’t exactly make Joan pleased to see Marie eager to talk to her. Once a harbinger, always a harbinger. Spies were dreadful for superstition.

“M. Bouchard,” said Marie. “I’m sorry, could you—?”

Léandre got to his feet, gripped Joan’s shoulder for a moment. “English business,” he said wearily, and there was a heavy irritation in his voice, coupled with resignation. Joan’s fingers brushed his for a moment. She thought his hand might have flinched away, but in the dark, judging only by touch, it was hard to tell.

His footsteps sounded, faded away; he was trailing one hand along the top of the wall to keep him right, walking in the direction of the house, where a group of Resistance men were probably still arguing—where a bed waited for them both to lie down, chaste as siblings.

Marie leant her bike against the wall and sat down beside Joan with a warm little exhalation, her body exuding companionable heat. Joan had felt more comfortable with Léandre next to her. “It’s nothing bad,” Marie said. Perhaps she knew her reputation. She spoke French; like Joan, and unlike Armand, she tried to keep out of the habit of speaking English. “Well, nobody’s blown.”

“Marie,” said Joan. (Wondering, even as she said it, if Marie felt the same curious disconnect upon hearing that name as Joan did when she was addressed as Juliette.) “You weren’t in the area, were you.”

“No. I was looking for you.”

“Why?”

“I’m being transferred to a different network.”

Joan inhaled slowly. The smell of grass and raw earth stung the inside of her nose. Her shoulders slumped. “Shit,” she said. “ _Shit_.”

Joan heard Marie kiss her teeth, and the slither and whisper of her long hair slipping over her shoulders as she tilted her chin up. “Shit,” she agreed. Her voice was silvery in the night and she sounded sad, not angry.

“Where?”

It was a stupid, insecure question, but Marie answered it anyway: “Occupied zone.”

“ _Shit_.”

After that, the silence was stricken. It felt to Joan like the few startled, blinking seconds after taking a punch.

Without Marie, the network would fold. Oh, it sounded melodramatic, but the second the thought passed through her brain she knew, with a sudden, gut-shaking certitude, that it was true. Armand would break down; his tenuous hold on the respect of his fellow agents and Resistance connections would follow. Anyone associated with him would be similarly discredited. And that was if they weren’t blown within weeks—Marie being the one to shepard Armand through security protocols, the one who kept him safe.

“You can’t go,” said Joan.

“That’s why I’m here,” Marie replied.

Silence.

There was the noise of Marie shifting as she sat—and a rusty creak. She still had one hand on her bike. Joan’s face was turned towards her, staring even though there was nothing to see but the barest silhouette of Marie’s face; her Roman nose, her delicate lips.

“ _Oh_.”

“Yes,” said Marie, steady and calm.

She wanted Joan to go for her. Into the occupied zone.

“Is that allowed?” was Joan’s first question, automatic, and though she couldn’t see it, exactly, she knew the look Marie was giving her in response, and laughed. “Sorry. Yeah. Stupid question.” It wasn’t as if Baker Street could _stop_ them.

In the silence, the demarcation line seemed to be palpable, a few miles off. It was north from here—a few hours walk—formed by the River Cher in this area, and policed along the bridges. Marie, understanding the shape of the silence, sought to fill it: “They need a courier. It’s you or me, and I—”

She was trying to reason with her. Joan was suddenly offended. Before she could work out _why_ , she said, “Sorry, do you think I need convincing?”

She had raised her voice; the silence afterwards was especially stark. Marie’s breath to-and-fro’d in the darkness. “Most people,” she said, “would need convincing to walk into Occupied France.”

Joan, uncomfortable, said, “It’s not like staying here is much of a holiday,” and left it there, wishing she hadn’t let herself sound so affronted. Most people _would_ need convincing to walk into Occupied France.

Marie left the silence for a few moments rather than pressing the issue. Joan listened to her breathing. It sounded slightly restrained—as if she were still half-holding it, not quite daring to believe. “Are you saying you’ll do it?”

Again, that anger, even though Joan was already berating herself for it, and she pushed it down better this time: “If it has to be done and there’s no one else, I’m not going to say no.”

“ _Thank you_.”

Joan, clench-jawed, looked away and gave a tight smile, as if for Marie’s benefit, though Marie couldn’t see it. She thought about Marie and Armand, and wondered, slightly uncomfortably, if Marie was thanking her for letting them stay together. 

She realised, with a sudden stab of regret, that she would have to leave Léandre on his own. But Léandre would rally. That was one of the reasons she liked him so much.

Marie was talking again. “They got me an Ausweis to cross the demarcation line but it matches my papers. You’ll have to do things…”

“Illegally.”

“Quietly.”

“I’ll find a way over,” Joan said, sounding more certain than she felt—seeming more certain than she felt. Of course, people crossed the demarcation line illegally all the time; in Resistance circles it was practically a status symbol.

Then again, in Resistance circles, people lied. And when they crossed the line, it was to ferry messages, arms, money—not try to survive there with no documentation. The Ausweis was only the start of the papers one needed to live in the occupied zone.

It was a fool’s errand, and Joan would be mad to agree. She knew as much. So with complete calm, she said, “Tell me more. What network, and where? Is there a first contact set up?”

“It’s strange,” Marie sighed. “It’s not the whole network. It’s some—it’s one person.”

“Right.”

“Callsign Knight, no word on any other identifiers. Wireless operator. Apparently he’s put in a request for a trusted courier because he thinks his whole network is insecure. Why he doesn’t just get out, I don’t know. And apparently neither does London. They don’t trust him. They’ve put another wireless operator into the network, Judge, with the instructions that I—that _you_ —should use them to send reports on Knight back home to Baker Street. Mental state, allegiance, that kind of thing. Listen, do you know what you’re taking on here?”

Callsign Knight. Traitorously, curiously, Joan flicked through her memory, but she could never identify people by callsigns. But it was all for the best, of course; she didn’t really want to know. So she reminded herself. “Yes.”

“Right. First contact is November the 11th, ten past eleven in the morning, the Rue Amandine in the 15th arrondissement.”

Joan’s heart threw itself against the bars of its cage. Her voice was stifled for a second—then, jerked from the back of her throat, she heard herself say, “Paris?”

“Paris,” Marie affirmed. She sounded totally normal, and from that Joan supposed she could deduce that she had sounded totally normal, too, saying that, saying _Paris?_ even though it felt as if she had opened her mouth and let her heart tumble straight out of her lips.

She swallowed—swallowed again. Her hands were resting on her thighs, and she curled her fingers into fists, staring out at the darkness. “Alright,” she said.

“Network’s called Professor,” Marie said, and Joan closed her eyes tight.

The tendons of Sherlock’s wrist straining as she worked a key, transmitting to Baker Street, stood out bright white in Joan’s mind, although she had never, in truth, seen any such thing. “I,” Joan said, _enjoy yourself_ , “alright,” the flutter of Sherlock’s eyelashes and how she looked when she was about to come, “I’ll think of how to,” the smell of the grass that night in Wanborough, _knew it_ , Sherlock so triumphant over Joan’s victory, “get over,” all of it was crowding her, was filling her, but Marie gave no sign that she noticed anything strange at all.

Her hand was on Joan’s wrist, and she was thanking her using a name which wasn’t hers: “Thank you, Juliette.”

“No,” Joan said.

“I’ll tell Baker Street I delegated the position to you. After you’ve gone, so they can’t forbid it. When you get there, make this Knight character talk to Baker Street so you can get documents dropped in, and get word down here that you’re safe. Are you sure you’ll be able to get across?”

“Nothing could stop me,” Joan said, and this time she felt the truth of it burning in her chest. “Do you need to stay here tonight?”

Marie’s fingers moved away, leaving a lingering warmth, a dampness—clammy, Joan realised with surprise. Marie’s hands had been clammy. Nervous. Joan nearly said, _I understand_ , nearly said, _you have Armand and I have Sherlock and I know what it’s like_ , but of course she wasn’t quite so stupid. “No thanks,” said Marie. “I’ll just keep cycling.”

Her footsteps crunched in the dark, then faded along with the rhythmic creak of her bicycle. Joan was left alone.

Slowly, thinking absolutely nothing, she made her way up to the house, where, in the parlour, a group of men hunched over the scratched-up table stopped talking the moment she came in. Léandre was sitting with them; he caught her eye, nodded, but said nothing. Joan considered saying, “I’m off to bed,” but realised it didn’t matter—realised she didn’t want to be so banal or so apologetically polite. She nodded back at Léandre and stepped into the next room, then turned on the lamp, dropped onto the narrow bed in the corner, and put her hand over her mouth.

The walls were thin. In the parlour she could hear the knock of glasses against wood, and grumbling murmurs starting up again, words filtering through: “...Bouchard,” and “pissing away opportunities to…” and, “if you—if you think…” Joan’s chest was shuddering, her eyes screwed tightly shut. The hand not clamped over her mouth was tight in the bedclothes.

Sherlock—Sherlock—Sherlock.

And Paris— _again_ —

—she had thought she was crying—and there was a tear streaking wetly down her face, yes, dripping onto her fingers—but it was only one, and she was gulping in air in a different rhythm now. Her throat felt hot, her face felt hot. She felt blank, numb. She was laughing—that one lone tear dripping off her fingers, splashing dark on the knee of her trousers—laughing.

She didn’t know how long she stayed like that, her head bowed and her hand tight over her mouth and chin. A few more tears slipped down her cheeks. She barely noticed them. She stared at her feet, planted apart, in Léandre’s boots.

If she could get across the demarcation line—and God, if ever there was an _if_!—but _if she could_ , she would see Sherlock within the week.

She wondered if she was happy. She didn’t feel it. She could feel the space for it, opened up in her chest—and she could clearly state all the reasons she had to be happy—but she felt too wracked, and too blank. Like the victim of some natural disaster, the earth itself shuddering under her feet. The shock was in her bones. It was blanched and terrible in its sheer emptiness.

When an emotional reaction finally hit her it was physical, violent, like a sudden retch—and even though there was that open space in her chest which by rights should have been bursting with happiness, what she felt was the kind of terror which made it hard to breathe.

She was worried about Sherlock. For the first time in two months she was worried about Sherlock.

Behind her hand, Joan made an ugly gulping sound, muffled a moan of, “Shit,” as two months of cold, certain dread rose up like bile, finally allowed to possess her because finally, finally, she might be able to do something about it. It came crashing over her: two months’ worth of wondering whether Sherlock was in France or not, whether she was being careful about her cover, whether she was medicating herself, whether she was laughing in the face of German soldiers—whether she had worked out why Corentin was dead, and how; whether she was eating, sleeping, smiling.

How had Joan pushed it down? What was wrong with her, that she had been _able_ to push it down?

She clenched her teeth, pushed her hand harder against her mouth, and waited for it to subside.

The door creaked, finally, and Joan looked up. Léandre was in the doorway. He stopped when he saw her, blinked, closed the door. Opened his mouth.

Joan had dropped her hand, straightened up, blinked a few times. “I’m fine,” she said, and her voice was croaky but definite.

Léandre closed his mouth, raised his eyebrows, and started to take off his jacket. His presence stirred Joan from her worries; she slumped backwards on the bed, breathing slowly.

After two months of restraint, it had been a relief to let herself be sick with fear. And now she was exhausted, light-headed, distant from everything. Léandre was taking off his boots. “I mean it,” Joan said. “I am...fine.”

“You drunk?”

“No.”

He moved about, thudded and rustled with more ostentation than Joan would have thought possible from someone only taking off their boots; _men_ , she sometimes thought, and she thought now, _men_ , who had never learnt to be quiet, never learnt to look away, never learnt to swallow their own thoughts—what were they doing in the secret world, really? What spies could they possibly make?

—but then again, _Sherlock_ —

—Joan took another long, rattling breath.

She heard Léandre’s knees thud against the floor, but didn’t think much of it until she felt his hand on her boot.

Joan sat up, scrambling backwards, and the only reason she avoided kicking him in the face was because he was pulling back already, hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, “I thought you were, I don’t know, already asleep—”

Jesus, just like Sherlock, taking off her boots that night in the hotel room, but— _but_. “I wasn’t,” Joan said.

“Yeah. I know. I’m sorry.”

She dropped her shoulders, ran her hand through her rumpled hair. Léandre was still on the floor, still sprawled there, his hands still up. She fixed him with a look which she hoped had a hard edge, but she felt so worn-out she doubted she’d managed it.

She swallowed, rallied herself. “I’m not going to shoot you,” she said, trying for a joke about his raised hands. Then, when he didn’t look consoled, she added, “I’m saving bullets.”

Finally he laughed, though he looked a little sick—miserable. It didn’t last long. She watched him swallow it as he stood up, shaking his head. By the time he was on his feet, he was smiling. “Not kicking me out of bed?”

“That would be practically pro-German,” Joan mumbled, pulling her feet up so that she could tug her boots off herself, while Léandre reached for the lamp—to relieve them both, probably, of the agony of having to feign normal facial expressions.

The bedstead was broken, and the springs beneath them creaked and whimpered as they settled down side by side on the narrow mattress: not touching, both fully-clothed. They had undressed in front of each other before, but not since Léandre had kissed her. Anyway, it was getting colder at night. 

Joan stared into the dark above her and listened as Léandre’s breathing—each exhale brushing Joan’s cheek—slowed, and he passed from the pretense of sleep to the reality. Joan knew it from how he slumped to the side slightly, arm falling against hers. It made her think of Sherlock’s body, warm and clumsy and clutching, that night in the hotel in London, though only because of how different _this_ was to _that_.

She thought, too, for the first time in a long while, of the house she and Persie had shared with Persie’s drunken brother—that bloody house, made out of cracks and unpaid bills, held together with the conviction that they were having fun. And yet the bedroom she and Persie had shared had been sacrosanct—at first, at least.

Joan had—.

Joan made herself think it; shaped the words in her mind, and opened her eyes to do it, determined not to flinch.

Joan had loved Persie. Joan had loved Persie’s mind. Joan had loved Persie’s stomach and cunt and eyelashes and palms and elbows.

There. She had thought it, finally; she had never let herself think it before. And years after the fact, years after that yearning ache had burnt out, Joan was surprised to find the world—still, quiet, unhearing.

She breathed. No one knew. No one but her. And perhaps Persie—but then Persie had never been much good at picking up on things unsaid, even if they were obvious—and—

And then there was the terrible promise Persie had made in their last conversation, the one which had turned cold and horrible in 1940 as Joan listened to the news on the wireless—“ _France has fallen to German forces_ ”—the promise Joan still couldn’t quite bring herself to remember.

She turned her mind away from it, left it mentally unsaid. Looking for a distraction, for a moment she found herself wondering why, having learnt that she could be with Sherlock within the week, she was thinking of Persie.

It was a stupid question, and Joan snorted quietly, then froze, listening, hoping Léandre was still asleep. He was. His breathing snuffled and sighed in the dark.

A stupid question. She was thinking of Persie because Persie was in the past. Sherlock was too close. Joan’s heart was too raw. Thinking about her set Joan’s nerves on fire.

She already felt hot, in fact. Skin-shivery. She took a deep breath, and stared upwards. There were other things she hadn’t let herself remember in any detail, these past two months...

The window was uncurtained. Joan liked it that way; after years of blackout regulations, seeing the moon from the window felt illicit—provoked a pleasure which felt oddly childish. On her back on the bed, Joan couldn’t see the moon, but the light spread sheetlike over everything; over the warped doorframe, the broken bedstead, the inscrutable lumps of their clothed bodies beneath the blankets.

Slowly, slowly, she peeled the blankets away from her with all the delicacy she usually put into preparing incendiary devices—trying not to disturb Léandre. Her breath was short in her lungs. The night was chill.

There were other things she hadn’t let herself remember. So many other things. Like Sherlock’s damn—Sherlock’s damn, wet, open _mouth_ —

—but that was too close, too much of a sudden shock to the heart, made Joan’s breath come sharp too quickly, made her wonder why _this_ was her response. The usual refrain: _what’s wrong with me?_

She swallowed it down—kept her hands flat on the bed—tried to think of other things. Her body felt charged, ready to react at the barest whisper of stimulation.

If she had to think about sex—if this sudden wave of unrestrained feeling had to trip a switch in her bizarre, badly-wired brain which made her suddenly, desperately aware of how long it had been since she had even touched herself, _two months_ —then she would think about sex with people other than Sherlock. She would think about—about that plump, pear-shaped girl in France, all over freckles with pale ginger hair, darker between her legs; with small ripe breasts heavy and warm in Joan’s hands, handfuls of flesh, pink nipples hard against her palms. Joan would think about how she had looked with her soft orange hair falling into her eyes, such wide grey eyes—her lashes still gummed together into wet spikes because she had cried, sobbed, when Joan had made her come.

In truth, Joan suspected that her eyes had been blue and that her breasts had been slightly fuller, too full to hold so neatly, but truth was a dangerous thing to deal in.

Léandre snuffled in his sleep and his breath rushed harder against Joan’s cheek. God he was close. His body radiated heat. She screwed her eyes closed, told herself she was a damn, damn fool, and moved her right hand from the bedsheets—to her stomach—to the swell of her left breast, muffled under her shirt. Cupped it beneath, rolled her palm— _ah_ —dragged the fabric against her hardening nipple.

Even muted through her bra, the sensation burst through her, made her push her teeth together. Fuck. _Fuck_.

Two months, and her body felt like unfamiliar terrain.

Was she really doing this? And _here_? Again, what was wrong with her? Breath still fluttering, shallow, she pushed a shaking hand underneath her shirt, Léandre’s shirt really, and pulled the cup of her bra down, rolling her nipple between thumb and forefinger, thinking—what if Sherlock were to—no, how about—how about another woman from France, with beautiful dark hair and—no use, no use.

Joan pushed her other hand up her shirt, pinched—fuck, _fuck_ , light flashing behind her eyelids, her fingers cold on her tits and goosebumps prickling on her skin. Sherlock was in her brain, was on her tongue, Sherlock saying, “Yes,” saying, “Did you like getting to slap me?” saying, “Enjoy yourself,” god, so _easy_ , and Joan had felt so free with her, like that, not saying _goodbye_ but _enjoy yourself_.

Joan was shuddering, eyes shut, throat sore. This was why she couldn’t think of her. Her—her chest felt full.

When she got Paris, if she got Paris, they wouldn’t sleep together. They had agreed on that, and Joan clung to it like a drowning woman to buoyant flotsam. God knows what she would do, what she would say, if she were to touch Sherlock now—if she were to feel Sherlock moving against her, her skin hot and her mouth—her mouth _familiar_.

Joan didn’t say, “Fuck,” but she would have liked to, to complete the sudden, scrambling moment of urgency—grabbing at the buttons of her trousers and pulling them open, shoving her hand between her legs and getting her fingers on her clit.

Christ. She bucked up, once—Léandre right beside her, almost touching her, breath against her face—twice—“Yes,” Sherlock had said when Joan had smacked her and set her pale, pink arse to shuddering under the flat of her hand, “Yes,” with her voice faltering and rough and demanding even while she whimpered—three times, “Yes,” and Joan’s orgasm hit her in hard, _hard_ shocks.

Her hips came down against the bed again. She breathed raspily. Léandre, beside her, hmmed and slept on. He was a solid weight, a pressing heat. Joan felt ragged, worse.

She didn’t stop. Blinking in the moonlight, hot, throat searing, cheeks wet, nose full of the smell of Léandre’s cigarettes and the scent of her arousal, she didn’t stop. 

Sherlock—Sherlock— _Sherlock_ , with her naked back, her naked wrists, her naked breasts—and the pink frill of her cunt, with a perfect, glistening droplet of moisture streaking down towards the pucker of her arse, all framed by dark, dewy curls. Joan could remember how it felt to bury her nose in the hair there, inhale her, to mouth at her cunt and kiss her, tongue her, taste her, to grip her thighs and feel the iron hardness of the muscles beneath her hands. How Sherlock would buck while Joan ate her and how wetness would drip down Joan’s chin, really _drip_ , spit and come, like she’d bitten into a peach. Wet stains on the sheets below.

Joan came again, with her breath hissing between her teeth, with her face pained and her heart searing and everything in her crying out and the house totally silent around her.

God! God. She wanted to tear herself to shreds. She didn’t stop.

Her throat hurt, her eyes hurt, her wrist hurt, her cunt hurt. She was fucking herself now, two fingers inside, her elbow working. Over-sensitive, clenching, twitching. She thought of how she had wanted to do just this to Sherlock, though she never had. Probably never would. She had wanted to just keep fucking her, to rub her and coax her and say, “Again, you can come again,” and have Sherlock saying, “Yes, yes,” sweat-soaked and spit-soaked and brilliant, never anything less than brilliant, “Yes,” as Joan kissed her on the collarbone and the forehead and the navel and the neck and told her so, _brilliant_ , “Yes,” as Joan worked her fingers into her, thumbed her clit, hummed and hushed and groaned and kissed her, “Yes,” their mouths wet, clumsy, a line of saliva breaking between them and dropping to Sherlock’s chin and staying there, glistening—ah— _ah_ —as Joan made her come—

The third orgasm, Joan barely felt; it shook her too deep.

After, hot-cold, trembling all over and feeling empty, Joan turned over onto her side and curled up that way, her back to Léandre. Somehow he was still sleeping, his breath stirring the hairs at the nape of her neck, shivering cold over the film of sweat there. Joan shuddered. Giddy and unlucid as she was, the world was moonlight settling like dust over everything, was beetroot in her mouth, was the smell of English lawns even though she was in France; in the zone non-occupée, for now. And the future—the future was occupied territory. Joan closed her mind to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew. Thanks for reading! The next chapter will be posted on Monday December 16th; there's some definite rejigging I have to do with it and with the next few chapters, so I'm going to have to postpone judgement on whether I'll be able to switch back to a weekly posting schedule over the Christmas break.
> 
>  **"black market affairs"** \- Due to the economic disruption which the German occupation of France caused, there was a thriving black market which mostly ran upon bartering, and also a wealth of unusual substitions for foods which were impossible to find—chicory root for coffee, for example, and chestnuts, acorns, etc instead of flour.
> 
>  **"Marie’s reputation"** \- Marie is a little bit based off a large assortment of SOE heroines and a little bit invention, but I think the woman who cycled for a day straight was Nancy Wake.


	19. Coffee Under Occupation

**GIÈVRES**  
 **FRANCE, ZONE OCCUPÉE**  
 **3RD DECEMBER 1942**

Rap—rap—rap—rap—Joan beat her fist against the farmhouse door, gulping in stinging dry air and shaking, quite literally, in her sodden boots. She was drenched. Her hair was plastered across her forehead. Her lungs couldn’t quite seem to keep hold of any air. It all came shuddering out of her mouth no matter what.

The door swung in: Joan nearly stumbled forwards. Instead she fixed the woman in the doorway with a stare of freezing steadiness, gritted her teeth to stop them chattering, and said, “I’m a friend of Léandre Bouchard. From Chabris.”

The woman’s eyes swivelled, scanning Joan and then the countryside at large with deep suspicion and slight horror—her cheeks, already pale, turning greyish. “Did you swim the river?” she hissed.

“Well, madame,” Joan said, smiling around her tight-clenched teeth, “it’s not raining, is it?”

The woman dragged her inside before one more droplet could splash from the hem of Joan’s trousers onto the grey stone doorstep, and banged the door shut. “Mistook you for a man,” she snapped, her tone accusatory. She wasn’t old—her hair was still a pale brown—but her face was hollowed out with worry and exhaustion, funereal before its time. “Before you opened your mouth. Why do you people dress like _gouines_?”

The word cut into Joan, made her gasp for reasons other than cold. Familiar. It was familiar. She hadn’t heard it in a while, though. _You flatter an old gouine_ , Lulu had said to Persie—but the woman was already stomping off, leading Joan into a hot, damp kitchen full of the smell of chestnuts. 

“My name’s Juliette,” Joan said, leaning against the wall and for a moment giving herself over to the warmth, even though her clothes ( _you people dress like gouines_ —) were still sodden, drenched with riverwater. The village of Gièvres was linked to Chabris by a bridge policed by German officers; the River Cher marked the demarcation line in the area. “You’re right, I swam the river.”

“ _Juliette_ ,” the woman sneered, her back to Joan as she clattered pans atop the stove, “ _mais oui, Juliette_ —none of you ever have more than one name. Well? Are you a Communist or English?”

“I told you,” said Joan, folding her arms and hugging herself tight, trying to breathe through the cold and the damp. “I’m a friend of Léandre Bouchard. You owe him a favour.” Privately, she couldn’t imagine this skull-faced woman and Léandre surviving in the same room for more than ten minutes. One would slaughter the other, and Joan couldn’t say which it would be. 

“Ha!” The woman seemed to be more interested in making an angry racket than actually producing anything from the stove; after a moment, she dropped away—turning—mopping her brow. Her teeth were gritted, Joan saw. “Yes. Yes, I do,” she muttered. There was a line between her brows, deep as if it had been cut by a knife. After a moment, she dropped her hand. “My name is Claudette Pichon,” she said.

Joan was fairly sure that was the truth, and wished she didn’t feel a stab of regretful sadness about it. Real names. Such a bad idea. She kept it off her face, though; tensed herself up against her shivers; said, “It’s nice to meet you, Mme Pichon. Thank you for letting me in.”

Mme Pichon gave a hard laugh, and seemed about to say something, but before she could get any words out there was a patter of feet behind Joan, and a boy of perhaps eleven appeared under her arm. He stopped short to stare up at her, and Joan was just about to grin at him when Mme Pichon shouted, “Out! Stay with your brothers and sisters, didn’t I tell you?”

Joan opened her mouth. The boy started and ran with a scared-rabbit swiftness, just a flash of brown hurrying back into the depths of the house. Too fast to catch any details. Like—just like Harry, actually, on one of his more cautious days, before he had started snapping back.

Shaken by this uneasy association, wondering why it should be so potent when Harry wasn’t a child anymore and hadn’t even really ever looked like Mme Pichon’s son, Joan looked to his mother, who was by the stove again.

The sight brought Joan back to her objectives. Mme Pichon’s narrow back seemed to sag like warped wood, her head hanging over the pot she was stirring. “I need dry clothes,” Joan said. “And whatever other supplies you can offer me. I’ll be out of here by tomorrow.”

“Don’t talk to my children.”

“I won’t.”

“Good,” said Mme Pichon, still with her head bowed—but then she heaved a breath, reached for a wooden bowl, and ladled a dollop of soup into it. Picked up a greyish heel of bread. Turned. Walked. Held both out. “The barn. Take this with you.”

The soup smelled earthy. Chestnuts. Léandre had warned her about the chestnuts. Joan saw the quiver of her hand, looked up, and noticed that a single bead of sweat had broken on Mme Pichon’s brow. “Thank you,” she said quietly, taking the bowl and the bread.

Mme Pichon was already moving away, opening a cupboard, pulling out an armful of clothing. It was dry, but when she pushed it into Joan’s grasp, Joan caught a waft of the smell of damp wool, as if it had been stuffed into the cupboard wet and left to go stale. “You’ll have to leave by the front door to get to the barn,” was all Mme Pichon said.

Knowing better than to thank her, Joan left. On the way out, she saw a telephone. It was the first she had seen in two months.

The barn, when Joan found it, was dusty, small, empty save for a few bales of sweet-smelling hay. Hands shaking, she stripped off Léandre’s soaking handmedowns and donned the dress and woollen stockings Mme Pichon had handed to her, rubbing her arms until she was no longer shivering—then sitting down on a bale of hay and drinking down the soup straight from the bowl. It tasted muddy and sweet, dripping thickly down her throat. Joan barely noticed anything but the temperature.

Finally she was warm enough to think about the thick unease which roiled in her stomach.

The image of that bead of sweat on Mme Pichon’s brow seemed to be imprinted on her brain, along with the quiver of her hand. Normal, she told herself, for a woman harbouring a British spy. (Here Joan screwed her eyes shut, dropped her head forwards). 

But.

But the telephone; it had looked new. Squeaky black plastic, barely smeared—a prized possession? No, even the cables were in good order. 

Now who, _who_ could have a new telephone in rural Occupied France, if not without German help?

Joan wondered why she was hesitating. There wasn’t really any question of what she had to do.

After grabbing her gun and the francs she had buttoned into her pockets—damp, cold, but still enough to get her to Paris—she left Léandre’s clothes there, a sodden, tangled mess atop a haybale. If they acted on Mme Pichon’s information and came to the house, they could at least believe her mistaken rather than a liar. 

Joan kept the _they_ strictly anonymous.

By the time she was a mile from the house, walking in the falling dark, Joan had almost completely banished from her mind the question of why a woman once— _still_ —trusted by Léandre Bouchard, with a number of young children and husband either dead, missing or non-existent, would inform.

Behind her the Pichon house glowed like a ship on a huge black sea, until she was deep enough in the woods that it disappeared. The night trembled, chilled. Her hair was still wet.

No point in trying to sleep. She would just walk on through the night, towards the railway. It made her think of that trek they had gone on through the Scottish countryside, with Sherlock walking before her—sweat sticking her shirt to her back. And the kiss which Sherlock had crushed against her mouth, on that hillside. Later, then, she had kiss-kiss-kissed her, over and over, as if trying to take something out of her and into herself. 

Under Joan’s boots, French soil cracked and shifted.

She thought of the second time they had slept together—before the telephone had cracked the soft murmur of sighs and groans and the rasp of wool on bare skin; the distant hoot of car horns and the rumble of a city briefly meaningless, as Joan had kissed down Sherlock’s trembling, taut stomach, to the thatch of curls between her legs. It had been slow—compared to the first time, it had been slow. Shifting. Like they were feeling out each other’s edges, drawing closer—with toes skimming down the backs of calves, with hands in hair and choked sounds.

She thought of how Sherlock’s eyes had brightened as she interviewed Edith Whistler, and the satisfied purr of her voice afterwards as she explained. _Suitcase—boom—a gin and lemon—closer to satisfaction with—yes_.

Even with the cataclysm of feeling which had broken through her defences, her mental cover, after she had received the news, Joan wouldn’t have dared think any of this in company. That was the only way she could carry on without feeling like her memories were leaking into the ether because of their sheer bright intensity. 

Not for the first time, Joan wondered why this—wanting Sherlock so _badly_ —was more daunting than creeping through Occupied France with no papers.

**PARIS**  
 **FRANCE**  
 **3RD DECEMBER 1942**

_Moriarty_. The name whispered itself in Sherlock’s mind, twisting and embedding itself further, as she herself moved further in pursuit, head down beneath the rain.

Paris seemed drowned. The streets were rivers, sluiced with water: German automobiles sent up white-trimmed splashes to soak the legs of passers-by and bicycles hissed through puddles, plumes of water spitting and foaming at either side of their wheels. The rain made the city’s echoes unearthly, so that they rose and fell, splashed and splattered with the drops. Sherlock pulled the collar of her coat up higher about her face, so that it hid her from the nose down, and hurried through the downpour.

Victoire was nowhere to be seen. Victoire, Sherlock imagined, was up in the room at the top of her aunt’s house, gazing disconsolately out at the rain-streaked city, thinking with a sulky cast to her mouth— _I’ll be stuck here all day_.

Sherlock was wearing someone entirely different. In fact, when she had come down from her room and into the parlour where her ‘aunt’ seemed permanently installed, Mme Cammaerts had given a kind of thin, gasping shriek and thrown a hand towards her kitchen knives.

“It’s _me_ ,” Sherlock had snapped, straightening up from the ne’er-do-well slouch she had adopted as part of the new disguise, and Mme Cammaerts had blinked and exhaled in a rush, with a number of disbelieving entreaties to the Virgin.

Really: with the price of women’s clothing these days, it was only economical to dress as a man. Not just that, though: it was wise considering her destination. Womanhood had its advantages (‘the best cover of all’, Mrs Beckett had called it at Beaulieu—Sherlock had almost been moved to smile, if uneasily) but any woman frequenting the twisting backstreets Sherlock was now heading towards would be an object of attention and interest. An operational nightmare. Now, walking with a wide, swinging step and wearing a pair of much-mended trousers and shirt under her smoke-reeking man’s coat, hair piled up under her once-smart hat, she felt gloriously invisible. Just one more disreputable youth skulking uneasily on the cobbles, hat low on his brow and coat-collar shadowing his lower face. Sherlock had physically knocked shoulders with three such men on this walk alone, and seen far more sheltering under awnings, in doorways, or drifting in groups like rainclouds blown across the sky.

In that glib and off-hand lingo which spies seemed to love, and which Sherlock couldn’t help but enjoy, playing the game of tailing someone without their knowledge was known as street artistry. Sherlock, as she wove through thin, cobbled lanes, found it aptly named. There _was_ an art to it—a balancing act of invisibility, navigation, good instincts and luck. The most difficult thing was to let go: to turn away from the mark, to follow on parallel streets, to be short of breath and tense until his rain-darkened overcoat drifted again into view, and he was once more under your spell as much as you were under his, with the chief difference between he and you being simply that he was unaware of his predicament.

Today, the rain-spattered shoulders which buoyed up Sherlock’s hopes every time she fixed them in her view belonged to a man who wasn’t French, and whose name wasn’t Michel, but who could pretend. He was a member of Professor network.

She watched each flash of the soles of his shoes as he walked, and thought about how eerie it was not to know anything about him from a glance. From the way he stopped to light and smoke his cigarette under a shop-awning, she would have pinned him as British even without the information gleaned from Resistance contacts who had met him and given her hints as to where he lodged. His callsign was Scientist; he had darkish hair, broadish, paleish features. There was a one in three chance that he was a German informant codenamed Moriarty. And yet beyond that, there was nothing. He could have been from Sheffield or from Glasgow; from Southampton or from Liverpool. He could have been anyone. He was a spy in Paris, not tall and not short, not handsome and not ugly, and Sherlock’s only option was to call him Michel. 

Following him felt like moving deeper and deeper into some sustained grey dream of an underworld. The air seemed to hold the echoes of a deep, uneasy chord, struck far off but lingering—vibrating low in Sherlock’s stomach. The clouds smothered the skyline, and while it was the afternoon, it was dark enough that each lighted window Michel passed made his wet overcoat gleam slickly before he faded again into one more distant patch of grey.

As a wireless operator, Sherlock’s official contact with her fellow SOE agents was limited to Georgette. Asking her for information on Michel had never been an option; not only would she not give it, but Georgette was no more implicitly trustworthy than the man Sherlock was currently following.

Moriarty. She had turned the name over and over in her mind, searching for something she had missed, since she had first decoded it and stared at it. How had Yves known it? It couldn’t be something simply assigned to a force he could detect but not discover, or why would he choose to pass it on?

Ahead of her, Michel turned a corner. Four seconds later, Sherlock turned it too, and was confronted with an empty street. Rain sliding down blind windows. Soaking the iron of outdoor chairs. Puddles.

The thing was not to stop walking. Anyone could be watching from a window. Sherlock kept her face blank, her collar turned up. The rain was thinning to a cloying drizzle, but that only made her more aware of how water-logged her clothing was, wet fabric slapping against her skin as she moved.

When she had rounded a few corners:

 _Damn_!

She sank back against a lamppost on an empty sidestreet, closing her eyes for a moment, and—upon being startled by the lap of water at her ankles—realising too late that she had stopped in a puddle.

Of course, it was easy enough to tell where he had gone. The only two places he could have disappeared into within the time he had were either a sad-looking cafe with wide, rainspattered windows, or a tall, narrow boarding-house with a prim sign declaring a complete lack of vacancies. Sherlock knew the spy’s instinct to keep away from windows and publicity. But the knowledge that Michel had vanished into a boarding house in a seedy area of town didn’t, really, say anything—not when Sherlock had done the same thing over and over, not just in the past few weeks but when she was in Paris the first time, years ago, following up stolen rings, eloped daughters, other trivia. She had done it on her visits to London, talking to the wrong sort of people. It could mean anything.

What it was most likely to mean was that Michel had realised he was being followed, and would in future be even more difficult to investigate.

It was no reflection on her own skills as a street artist; Sherlock knew that. It was just that tailing someone efficiently really required an organised team of associates. In fact, most spycraft was the same: an exercise in uneasy trust, the science of getting people to work with and for you without ever compromising the essential solitude of your position.

And speaking of.

Sherlock opened her eyes, shook her head, righted her hat. Finally, she glanced at her watch.

Good. Quarter to four. Providing Baker Street had managed to direct someone decent from another network up into Paris, she would make the first contact with her requested courier on time.

* * *

Joan slept on the train, and woke up starving and parched—could barely choke down the bread she had brought with her for want of water to go with it. She ate it nonetheless, tearing it in two and cramming one half into her mouth. The other she pushed back into her coat pocket.

It was the eleventh of November. The day of first contact. Exhaustion pressed tight behind Joan’s eyes, but it was only physical. Her nerves were quicksilver, bright with anticipation.

It was interesting; she still wasn’t afraid.

Not daring to try the station at Gièvres, she had instead found the tracks and walked along them until daylight, arriving at Romorantin at seven in the morning. Footsore, aching, and damp from the rain which had begun to filter down through the air in the middle of the night, but somehow not tired, she had found a cafe and had her first experience of what passed for coffee under Occupation—some sludgy, mysterious brew, thick with chicory and rationed-out sweetener. Swallowing it hungrily nonetheless, she read the paper by proxy by listening to a group of men in a corner peel apart the pages and mutter quietly about each story in turn. With the money spared by cutting a few stops off her ticket, she was tempted to try buying more bread, but didn’t dare push her luck with an unfamiliar face and no ration book.

At half past eight, she had caught her train. Now, at three in the afternoon, it was pulling into the Gare du Lyon, and Joan still wasn’t afraid. 

She half-hoped fear would kick in as she approached the checkpoint, where a woman in shapeless grey was checking papers at random. 

If she was asked for papers, Joan supposed she would cause a fuss, claim she had left her bag on the train, weep, shout—anything. She didn’t think of herself as a good actress, but she knew she could try. Perhaps they would push her on, tired and unwilling to put up with the histrionics of some burgeoning old maid. “La prochaine!” Perhaps they would take her away for questioning, and that would be alright as well. There was always a weak link in any journey; at some point, pushing her into a car or leaving her in a room alone, she would be able to shove her way out, cause confusion, run. They would underestimate her. That was certain. She would use that somehow. Somehow.

It was a stupid plan and Joan knew it could go terribly, terribly wrong, but here she was and she wasn’t afraid.

The trick was to believe that she had papers and, at the same time, to expect the worst. It was a kind of sleight of mind. Her heart was audible in her ears but so was everything else; the flutter of pigeons, the murmur of French—everyone ceasing to speak as they drew closer to the woman, creating a bubble of sullen silence about her—the rattle of trains in the distance— “La prochaine!” —was this how Sherlock felt all the time?

Sherlock—Sherlock— _Sherlock_ —her nonexistent papers going unchecked, Joan was dragged by the movement of the crowd out onto the street, soles finding purchase on the cobbles. She felt like she’d just surfaced from the depths of icy water, and blinked, blinked again, tried not to gasp: but somehow she was breathing normally, and just trundling along as if it were any other day.

Somehow, she kept it up.

The streets were familiar; greasy and splattered with the rain that had just stopped, with that blinking, newborn look that cities had after a heavy storm. Avoiding the puddles, Joan thought of how, four years ago, she had made up her mind never to come back—not just to Paris, but to everything that had happened in its backstreets, its cabarets, its clubs and bars. All the things which had passed between the strings of lights and the shadows. She hadn’t counted on rediscovering that secret space within herself. Hadn’t counted on Sherlock, on the war, on anything.

The rendez-vous was scheduled for twelve minutes after four. Joan kept walking; kept her head down.

That was easy, at least. She looked unfashionable; it was a shock to find she cared. It was the skirt she minded—the ugly lumpen woollen stockings. Wearing them here, in Paris, was strangest of all. The present was colliding oddly with her memories. She couldn’t help but think of (it almost made her laugh, it almost made her chest hurt) the borrowed, begged and second-hand suits she had worn four years ago. Even while attending lectures, she had worn trousers, though with the concession of a blouse—a hat—something to put people at ease. But she had spent her first week after discovering the clubs bent over a man’s suit jacket—a boy’s, really—stitching furiously, hopefully. Arm pistoning, needle flashing, jaw set, thinking— _there are other options, and no one told me_ —

Ten minutes to four.

 _She had decided not to come back_. She could remember Persie’s face—the wavering unclarity of memory mixed with the tears which had drenched her cheeks making her visage seem watery, submerged. “It’s not worth it—it’s not worth it, Joan!” —or, no, had that been what she had said about Joan fighting with Violette?

Perhaps it didn’t matter. It was just exactly the sort of thing Persie said—the sort of thing that left Joan’s heart starving. “What _is_ worth it?” —she had never asked. When she had been breaking the news to Persie, all she had said was, “I’m going, Persie,” and, “I have to go,” and, “You can’t change my mind.”

Persie, tear-sodden and with one hand in her hair—in her blue silk—no, that was Sherlock—in her _peach_ silk nightgown, looking stricken in her tumbled-down beauty—had said, “You’re afraid of—”

Of what? Of war coming, of going rotten at the core, of drinking too early in the mornings and playing cards with Lulu too late at night? Of Persie and her peach silk nightgown, her peach silk skin, her lips plush and pale? “I just have to go.”

Nine minutes past four.

And then—Persie’s voice choked with tears—Joan had felt sick with herself—Persie had said what Joan had been trying not to think of since 1940, which was, “I’m never going back to England, you know. I’m never leaving France. You can run away. I’ll be damned glad to stay without you.”

Eleven minutes past four.

Joan looked around at Paris in 1942 and hoped to God Persie had proved as flickering and inconstant as ever—had gotten on the last boat to England or some other romantic, daring thing, had set up in London. Or in Brighton. Joan had heard there were lots of girls like them in Brighton. Persie could have brought bloody Violette if it came to that. No, she could live with Dominique and Lulu and some handsome, well-meaning girl to share Persie’s bed—all of them in a two-bedroom flat above some flagging fish’n’chip shop, complaining about the smell of grease, weathering air raids and blackouts; Lulu spitting her way through English, brows drawn tight. And safe, all of them—safe, somehow.

Underneath it all: Sherlock—Sherlock—Sherlock, running beneath the surface of the past, although this had been before she met her: Sherlock shaping her thoughts, meting out the beat of her heart: if Sherlock had been there, in her blue silk nightgown, hand in her hair—if Sherlock had said, “You’re afraid of,” would she have listened to the end of the sentence? Would Sherlock have said it at all?

Then there was the thump of a warm body against her back—“ _Merde_!”—and the crack of cobbles against her knees.

The world was a smear of grey. Joan had a sense of falling shock. Then all she could see was a shifting parade of other people’s feet as they stopped, some of them only for a second before they hurried on, some of them coming with concerned inquiries.

Heart suddenly steady, thinking _careful_ , everything coming in perfect focus, Joan blinked and sat up, immediately, darkly and totally suspicious of anyone who could manage to creep up behind her. Later, she would wonder at not coming to the obvious conclusion more quickly, and yet—and yet. Still on the cobbles—unwilling to show any kind of questionable robustness—she looked blinkingly upwards.

The man who had walked into her had staggered too, grabbing a nearby lamppost for support, and when she saw him, he was righting himself—so that those first few seconds were an unfolding. So that Joan saw his rainspattered overcoat—his long hands—a dark, youthful curl escaping his low-pulled hat in that order, somehow—and knew, before being able to really think it coherently—knew that his gaze would be grey under the brim of his hat.

It was. Grey and direct. Joan’s heart was trying to cram itself into her throat.

In quick, fluttering, dispassionate French, Sherlock said, “Ah, I’m so sorry, madame—”

Holding out a hand. 

“I’m not hurt,” Joan croaked, grabbing Sherlock’s wrist—warm in her hand, the familiar prod of her sharp wristbones like a knife to the heart—and staggering to her feet—but Sherlock’s hand was gone from hers in a second, returned to the depths of the youth’s pockets.

“So sorry,” repeated Sherlock, or rather the young man with her eyes. “You’re certain you’re not—” A shrug, half-devoted to ducking out of the way. Moving while he spoke, clearly reluctant to hang around making amends to some hatless _paysanne_ in woollen stockings.

Joan remembered she was meant to be French, muttered, “Yes, yes—no thanks to you—”

Sherlock made a noise low in her throat, rounded her shoulders, and strode away. Joan looked away, so as not to stare after her. Didn’t take a deep breath. Just walked, turning a corner away from Sherlock as soon as she possibly could.

She kept walking, keeping her eyes straight again. Hot in her clothes. Sweat dripping down the back of her neck. Everywhere Sherlock had touched her seemed to burn.

It wasn’t until she had rounded a few corners, come to a quiet spot, that she felt safe enough to slip her hand into the sleeve of her coat and pull out the piece of paper Sherlock had dropped there when she had helped her up.

  
18 RUE GHISLAINE  
13ÈME ARRONDISSMENT  
9:30PM

* * *

Joan.

They had sent her Joan.

No.

Joan had sent herself.

They would _never_ send her Joan.

Somehow, Sherlock’s thought processes couldn’t get beyond that loop. She staggered onwards, Paris streaming by her—just about keeping up the rolling swagger of a scruffy, defensive-looking young man as, within herself, her mind stuttered disbelievingly. _Joan_. 

The Rue Ghislaine was empty save for a much-kicked dog lying where it was leashed. Sherlock seemed to feel the street tipping beneath her as she reached across an impossible distance for the door, shoved the key in the lock, stumbled in.

Joan.

She mounted the stairs, jaw slack and fingers trailing along the bannister—fingers which had closed on Joan’s wrist, dropped that impersonal note down her sleeve.

The parlour was dark, thick with heat and a murky, vegetable smell. Dye. Sherlock stopped in the doorway in her rain-wet suit, taking her hat off and letting her hair tumble hectically around her face. Blinking. Mme Cammaerts was bent over the stove, presenting her back to the door, shoulders moving. Sherlock gripped her hat with both hands like an anxious suitor.

“Expect a visitor,” she said, and Mme Cammaerts glanced over her shoulder. This time, she betrayed no reaction whatsoever to Sherlock’s masculine dress, though her eyes lingered curiously on Sherlock’s face.

“Who?” she asked, but Sherlock shook her head.

“A friend,” she said. Then, after a stuttering pause: “She’ll want food. Something cold will do.”

Mme Cammaerts’ nose wrinkled slightly. “Ah.”

“What?”

“From your face, I thought it must be a man.”

For a few moments, Sherlock looked blankly back at her, wondering if she was meant to reply to that. Mme Cammaerts had a gaze sharp as a pin, and Sherlock could feel it sticking into her. 

“No,” she said at length, the syllable clumsy and a little stupid.

“No,” echoed Mme Cammaerts, and returned to mixing dye. On the kitchen table lay an expanse of lace—formerly a curtain, before cannibalisation. Next to it was Sherlock’s hat—well, Victoire’s hat. Plum felt. Mme Cammaerts had been loudly denouncing its plainness just the other day. Sherlock stared at the spread, feeling somewhat adrift; surprised that such things still existed and, arguably, mattered. Lace. Dye. Not having a plain hat.

“Half past nine,” she said, too abruptly. “She won’t be late.” And then: “I’m going upstairs.” And then: “Try not to ruin the hat, won’t you?”

“Ha!”

There was more; another scoff, another mutter. Sherlock missed it. The thunder of her heart and the creak of the stairs beneath her feet filled her ears as she climbed towards her room.

Once there, she shut the door and leaned against it, looking straight forwards.

 _Joan_.

She lost count of the seconds. For at least a minute, she was still. Then, slowly, manipulating her own limbs like unfamiliar instruments, she walked heavily to the bed, sat down, and put her elbows on her knees.

A dark-winged thought kept battering at her brain. It was _what does she think she’s doing?_ and it was meaningless, because Sherlock knew the answer.

Joan was Joan—as catastrophic as that fact was, Joan was Joan—and being Joan, had heard, somehow, that an agent up in Paris needed a new courier. Perhaps she had heard the name of the network, Professor—the name which had seemed so far away in London, which was now built into the fabric of Sherlock’s life. Perhaps she had just heard Paris. Perhaps she had just heard that a courier was needed; why assume Joan needed the impetus of the case to come?

Whatever she had heard, she had promptly crossed the demarcation line—probably without papers—and arrived in Occupied Paris—probably still without papers. Like she had some kind of duty.

Sherlock steepled her fingers in front of her mouth: thought _Moriarty_ , thought _Joan_ : closed her eyes hard and felt the thunder of her heart and the whir of her brain threaten to shake her whole frame.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I'm going to be keeping up a fortnightly posting schedule over the holidays, I'm afraid, because I think a slow but steady pace is probably better than falling behind and having to take a lasting hiatus. So: the 30th of December. See you then.
> 
>  **"The village of Gièvres was linked to Chabris by a bridge policed by German officers; the River Cher marked the demarcation line in the area."** \- I came across a story about crossing the demarcation line in this area which I couldn't find any further historical support for, and which proved, anyway, to be too complex and boring when I tried to incorporate it into the actual story, but which is marvellous as a possibly apocryphal anecdote. Basically, the Germans on the bridge weren't the brightest, and so anyone who wanted to cross from Occupied to Vichy France without papers would go up to the guardhouse and tearfully tell a story in which they actually lived in the Vichy village and needed to cross into Occupied to see a sick relative etc etc, but they'd left their papers at home. The two soldiers would immediately get heated at the very idea that anyone could cross the bridge without papers, and march this person into Vichy France, under the illusion that they were returning them home.


	20. En Français, Idiot!

By the time Joan was sitting in the hot, airless dark of Mme Cammaerts’ parlour, she was almost too hungry to think about Sherlock.

“She said to give you food,” Mme Cammaerts said; a clatter sounded as she slammed another bowl down on the table, this one full of something murky, brown, unintelligible.

Joan, already shovelling thick, tasteless porridge into her mouth, said, “Yeah, she has some good ideas sometimes,” and Mme Cammaerts barked out a whipcrack of laughter, before her face went tight again and she folded herself into her seat by the stove.

Joan’s hands were clumsy with cold and hunger. She scraped the porridge bowl empty and reached for whatever was in the second bowl, her stomach giving pangs but her instincts saying to keep eating, keep drinking. The thick brown liquid tasted dark, herbal, smoky. When it hit the back of Joan’s throat it nearly made her eyes water. Her face felt hot. Sweat mixed with rainwater beneath her collar.

When she put down the bowl and wiped her mouth, she finally dared say, her voice ragged, “Where is she,” with no question mark. A cough of a demand.

Mme Cammaerts was silent for a few moments. Joan met her gaze; a thread stretched across the room. Finally: “Upstairs.”

Joan said nothing, just pushed back her chair and started to walk.

Measured steps. Up and up. A staircase which lasted for miles. And her heart hurting to know that Sherlock could hear the anxious creak of her tread on the stairs: how they whined, splintered the silence. Joan kept her shoulders back. Normally, in France, she took care not to walk like a soldier, but— _but_.

Joan put her hand flat against the door, and pushed.

Inside, Sherlock stood facing the window, her shoulders and back tapering down towards the waistband of her trousers; her shirt a triangle of white cotton. Her curls were wet with leftover rain. Her arms were folded, hands just above each elbow.

Joan opened her mouth, then closed it: it would be foolish to say _Sherlock_. Instead she cleared her throat, shut the door behind her.

Sherlock reached out and closed the shutters, and Joan had a dizzying, vertiginous flash of what the window must look like from the street; white, with Sherlock framed in it and perhaps a sliver of Joan over her shoulder or to her side. And then closed off, soundlessly.

Outside, rain began to patter. Sherlock turned—not all the way, but enough to look at Joan. Her face looked as close and as far as the moon underwater, and had that same shimmering, shifting quality, without ever quite seeming to move: a tremulous shudder of emotion just under the surface.

Joan said, in French, “I heard you needed extra hands.”

“Yes,” Sherlock said. “I suppose I do.”

There was silence as they looked at each other. Joan’s breaths felt shallow. In fact, everything felt too light; the world only brushed against her skin, not really coming into contact with her. Sherlock hadn’t blinked since turning to face Joan. Her arms were still folded. Joan noticed that her knuckles were white. Then Joan noticed that she was looking at Sherlock’s hands, and not her face, and looked up again. If anything, Sherlock’s eyes had gotten wider, greyer, since Joan’s gaze had dropped from them.

“ _Merde_ ,” said Joan, and started across the room. It was enough to make Sherlock unfold her arms in a fluid, startled movement, as if expecting to have to defend herself. Joan stopped a pace short of her, and said, “You madwoman, that was the stupidest, most insecure attempt at a live drop I have ever seen—”

Finally Sherlock’s expression cracked, a kind of surprised joy leaping into her eyes, like a candleflame jumping for a second in a gust of wind before being snuffed out—it was brief, but it was there, Joan was _sure_. And it snatched the breath from Joan’s lungs. Sherlock said, in English, voice a low rumble, “So do I take that to imply you’re now a seasoned spy—”

Joan clamped her hand over Sherlock’s mouth. Said, “ _En français_ , idiot.”

Beneath her palm, Sherlock’s lips were warm and parted. Rough, almost, as if chapped. Slowly, Joan lowered her hand. She had to.

For a moment, she thought she might be swallowed by Sherlock’s grey, trembling-not-trembling stare. Then Sherlock broke the silence and said, _en français_ , as demanded, “My question?”

“If you were asking if I’ve been busy,” Joan said, her voice quiet and, as she heard it, strangely defiant, “then yes. I have.”

Sherlock’s mouth twitched into a smile, which quickly dissolved, leaving behind a look of tense, burning determination. She stepped forwards—Joan put up a hand—Sherlock said, “I only want,” and kissed her.

So Joan closed her eyes and pretended that it wasn’t a bad idea. Sherlock’s lips on hers.

It should have been like the kiss on the hillside in its urgency. It wasn’t. Joan pressed her fingertips into the gaps Sherlock’s ribs, pushed up against her and kissed her out of breath. Their mouths were hard, slow. Familiar, now. And Joan could feel her own heart shuddering within her chest, as Sherlock, her fingers hard on Joan’s scalp, pushed her hair back from her face, smoothed her thumbs across her temples, kissed her over and over.

“We said,” Joan said, and Sherlock said, “I know,” and Joan carried on, “You said,” and Sherlock said, “I _know_ ,” kiss-muddled and with her forehead pressed hard against Joan’s. When Joan opened her eyes, Sherlock was staring at her, her grey stare raw and hard. She was shockingly beautiful, Joan realised. It wasn’t that she had forgotten. Just that seeing was different from remembering.

“Damn you,” said Joan, “we’re speaking English,” and kissed her again; Sherlock laughed, although it was really only a hitch of breath, muffled by Joan’s mouth. The rain was battering the shutters, tearing the air outside; Joan’s chest was full to burst. The kiss was warm, as if Sherlock had carried it in her mouth all the way from London. When Joan closed her eyes she saw blackouts.

After two months of being the perfect spy, something in Joan ached for wanton, brash insecurity.

“I only want,” Sherlock said again, and even though they had pulled away from each other—noses touching, Joan’s eyes still not open—she didn’t finish the sentence.

She was right to say it, Joan knew. Only. Spycraft was knowing where to put the only. Where to draw the boundary. “Yeah,” Joan said at length, eyes opening; “yeah, I—yeah.”

Sherlock drew a few steadying breaths. Joan saw them diffuse through her. Then she leaned away, straightening up. Her hands dropped from Joan’s head and lowered uneasily to her sides. Joan saw her throat move, then traced the white column upwards to her jaw, over her lips, her nose; met her eyes. The air between them seemed to vibrate. Joan’s nerves were buzzing, whining, her heart stuttering in her chest. 

“So,” Joan said.

Sherlock’s gaze had drifted from her. She was blinking as if in new light. “Moriarty.”

“What’s that?”

Joan almost jumped as Sherlock looked back at her again, seemingly snapping back to life. “No idea,” she said, and eased some tension out of her shoulders in a kind of shrug; a sigh. She shook her head, waved a hand, and broke from the little figure they had made together—darting sharply away, throwing herself down onto the bed and putting a hand to her mouth. The motion was a shock to Joan’s entire system; so familiar that it was close to the bone, though when Sherlock’s habits had become Joan’s habit to watch she couldn’t actually say.

“Corentin was right,” Sherlock said, rubbing her lower lip, looking at something only she could see. “It’s,” she hissed her English _s_ , tongue flicking her lower lip as she tasted the word or tasted the remnants of the kiss, “an infection, a _spreading_ —.” She pursed her lips jealously on the end of the sentence. Left it. Joan watched her uncertainly, waiting for her to carry on.

When she didn’t, Joan prompted, “What is? Moriarty?”

“Mm. Something like that.” Sherlock looked up at her, and said, “I expect you’ll be flippant if I ask why you’re here?”

Joan said, “I told you. I heard you needed me.” A long, unsteady pause. “I heard you needed some help.”

Sherlock’s knuckles were white where she was gripping the patchwork quilt. The rain wailed with fresh intensity. Outside there came splashing footsteps, a bluster of female voices raised through the rain—someone shouting to be let under an umbrella, cursing her friend—quickly lost. 

Joan stepped forwards slowly. “I’m not going to go back on—”

“I am perfectly aware—”

“It would be so _stupid_ , anyway—”

Sherlock’s eyebrows lifted up, mouth tightening for a second. Voice like a whipcrack, she said very suddenly, “And crossing the demarcation line with no papers, conversely, would be _just common sense_.”

Slowly, Joan pushed out her breath, sank her shoulders down. Looked at the ceiling. “Okay,” she said quietly, barely moving her lips. Then she looked at Sherlock again and moved forward. She took care to put no ceremony into it. Just crossed the few steps between them and sat by her on the bed.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, you have a point.”

“I usually do,” Sherlock said.

“Not always. Sherlock?”

“Yes.”

“Are we arguing or not?”

Sherlock looked across at her, one eyebrow arched. “Not with each other,” she said.

“Oh?”

“You’re arguing with yourself over what would be right, I’m arguing with myself over what would be logical.”

Joan opened her mouth to say _I’m not sure that’s_ , then closed it, shook her head. “Alright,” she said. “Come to any conclusions?”

Sherlock looked at her for a few moments, and then leaned in.

They knocked teeth when they kissed; scraped, bit, licked clumsily into each other’s mouths, with hands tight in damp fabric. Joan took a ragged gulp of air which seared her throat, and shoved her mouth back against Sherlock’s. Sherlock said, “J—” and Joan said, “Don’t you dare say—” even though she wanted, more than anything, to hear her own name said back to her, just once.

She kissed Sherlock speechless instead.

Then they were push-pulling, Sherlock’s head on the pillow, her damp curls spread out across it and her mouth open, wanting: the rain battering at the window still. “Fuck,” Joan said, “oh, fuck you, this, this is,” but it was all lost in the side of Sherlock’s neck, and in how Sherlock was pushing her hands up under Joan’s blouse, and, oh: Sherlock’s hands, Joan’s body—it was all the same as it had been before. No, it was unutterably different.

Too much space between them.

The bed was creaking beneath them, whining: their breaths were short already, shredding the silence. The rain hissed and splattered. Sherlock’s fingers were hard, warm, and she kneaded at Joan’s chest without ceremony, bit her lower lip, said, “ _Shut up_ ,”—Joan hadn’t realised she had been talking. Strange; usually Sherlock wanted her to talk, talk, talk.

She was atop Sherlock’s hips and realised she hadn’t any idea of what she was going to do. For now, this press of bodies, mouths, was enough. When Sherlock’s hips rocked, Joan liked it only for the shared movement. The roll, the pitch. Between Sherlock’s hands and Joan’s skin there was, now, a slippery sheen of sweat; a hot clamminess. “I didn’t,” Joan said, “for two months, I swear to God I barely thought about you—”

Anyone else but Sherlock and Joan would have been pushed to the floor, she was sure, but Sherlock snarled, “Of course you didn’t, you’re not stupid,” and Joan said, “I’m sorry—”

“Oh for God’s sake—kiss— _kiss_ me,” Sherlock’s voice heightening to a whine without losing any of that temper and that need.

“You’re not,” Joan said, “you’re not exactly forgettable, it was—not easy—”

“I like it,” Sherlock hissed through gritted teeth, rolling with a sudden burst of strength so that Joan was pinned beneath her, arm at an awkward angle, her spine twisted and her skirt unbuttoned, “I like it when you do things which _aren’t easy_.”

In the course of scrambling with fastenings, Joan nearly ripped Sherlock’s shirt, and Sherlock caught Joan’s thigh with her ragged nails, left long pink stripes. Joan lifted her hips to free her skirt; Sherlock flung her shirt across the room.

“Oh God,” Sherlock said, when they were bare-chested against each other, rolled onto their sides now, a tangle of limbs and clothing. Joan’s skirt was about her ankles, hampering her; Sherlock’s trousers were tangled about her knees. Joan pushed her face into the sweat-damp crook of her shoulder, and thought: _I’ve missed you_ , but didn’t dare say it.

Skin on skin and faces in shoulders, with Sherlock’s hair in Joan’s mouth and fingers spread out on each other’s backs, hips, sides, they stopped. It wasn’t quite a cessation of movement. Joan curled tighter in, and so did Sherlock, both of them pushing closer, tighter; Sherlock’s leg hooked about Joan’s hip, her heel pressing into the back of Joan’s thigh. Joan’s hand moving up Sherlock’s back to grip her shoulder from behind, tight.

The knee not clamping down on Joan’s hip was shoved between Joan’s legs. _I’ve missed you_. Joan still didn’t say it. Instead she pushed up against her and must have cried out, because Sherlock said, “Shh,” like she was begging. Her hand was over Joan’s mouth in a second, and Joan was kissing her palm, was biting her palm. Her leg was rough-textured where Joan’s thighs were clamped about it. No razors to spare in France. Joan dragged Sherlock’s hand away from her lips and kissed her instead. She tasted of chestnuts.

If she could just inhale Sherlock deep enough, get her right down in her lungs—if she could just grip tight enough—they could be back in London, in the hotel room with the door that locked upon closing. And speaking of— “Is the door locked?”

“It doesn’t lock,” said Sherlock. Joan heard the gurgle of her strangled swallowing, the click of her throat. Her mouth was wet, Joan’s chin was wet; their kisses sloppy, hard, sour. Their skin stuck and unstuck, sweat-hot, glistening. Joan’s breath was sobbing in her chest; barely aroused, she nonetheless wanted. It was a physical, implacable ache. “Mme Cammaerts won’t—”

“Okay, okay—” That small concession to security done with, she didn’t want Sherlock to talk; her voice sounded too broken-up, too tremulous. Sherlock rolled her hips, a stuttering, hard movement. Her body was hard, all elbows; a collection of joints. Long and awkward, really. Joan wanted the insides of her elbows and the stubble on her calves and the soft, vulnerable jump of the pulse in her throat. Her dagger-like collar-bones.

Had she taken this for granted before? How?

But Joan couldn’t wonder. Couldn’t think. There was no space. Instead she sucked a bruising red mark on Sherlock’s shoulder, whimpering—“Hn”—like a child, blood vessels breaking under Sherlock’s skin and the patch mottling. Her skin tasted of sweat, of salt. “I, I. Oh. Sherlock. Oh.”

Joan only realised she had come when the aftershocks hit her, when her hips stopped moving and she found that her leg had cramped up painfully; when she groaned long and loud into Sherlock’s shoulder, slowly unwinding.

Sherlock was still save for a fine, fluttering tremor which seemed to run all the way through her.

Their breathing shook them both as they held onto each other, and for a long time neither spoke.

Joan screwed her eyes shut and breathed in the smell of smoke, rain, that thick earthy smell of the parlour rising up and hanging in the air: beneath it all, Sherlock’s sweat. The taste of chestnuts on her mouth, thick and earthy. Joan wanted to lick it from her.

Slowly, Sherlock unwound herself a little—Joan felt muscles under her hands stretch and ripple—and pulled away enough to push her hair from her eyes. Then she reached for Joan’s arm, running her hand down the length of it, until her hand wrapped for a moment about her wrist. Joan let her do it. It wasn’t a caress.

“You’ve gotten use out of your gun,” Sherlock said, her fingers exploring Joan’s palm, her roughened calluses.

“I shot someone,” Joan said, not so much confessing it as asking Sherlock for a reaction, so that she could feel some kind of boundary. So she could work out what she thought of it.

Of course, all Sherlock said was, “Yes, that’s usually how one gets use out of a gun,” her voice deep and dry. Joan shook her head, and all the same a smile trembled on her mouth for a second; yes, of course. “Who?”

“Gendarme. We’d just set off a railway charge.”

Sherlock _hm_ ’d and didn’t say _well done_. Joan was glad for it. She closed her eyes—but then opened them again at a sudden upwards quake; Sherlock shoving herself up on her elbow and leaning over Joan with a searching intensity in her eyes. Joan said, “What?” but Sherlock was already talking, one of Joan’s hands clasped in hers and held up.

“Dirt beneath your fingernails. And your shoes are caked in it, of course. You walked most of the way.”

“Some of the way.”

“And some of it you swam. Across the River Cher?”

“How do you know?”

“The scent of your blouse. Doesn’t smell of you. It’s spent most of its recent life shoved in a cupboard, in fact. So: a recent hand-me-down. And considering the geography of France and the fact that swimming the Cher is the easiest way to cross the demarcation line, it makes sense that you would acquire it after getting soaked doing so.”

“That’s right.”

“Of course it’s right. You’ve lost weight.” She was sliding down Joan’s body, pushing her fingertips into the softness of her belly, making Joan squirm slightly, half laughing, though uneasily.

“Yeah, well. Food’s not great in Vichy, either.”

“No. Clearly not.” There was something urgent about the low hum of Sherlock’s voice, and the insistent, almost medical press of her fingertips. Joan pushed herself up on her elbows to look down as Sherlock investigated her—running her hands up her thighs now, and rubbing along the edges of her kneecaps, feeling out the joins of bones beneath the skin. “Running?” she asked.

“Endlessly,” Joan agreed, shifting and trying to smile through her discomfort.

“You fell. Recently.”

“Got a little too close to an explosion.” She thought about explaining more, but drew uneasily away from the idea. “I’m not still bruised, am I?”

“Your ankle’s a little swollen.” Sherlock was sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed now, entirely naked, Joan’s foot in her lap. Her fingers ringed Joan’s left ankle. “I doubt walking on it helped.”

Joan tried not to curl her toes—licked her lips—wished Sherlock would look at her face, rather than the myriad clues on her body. She wanted to say _I’d tell you, you know, you don’t have to deduce_ , but instead she ended up saying, with uncomfortable jocularity: “I wouldn’t look at my toenails, if I were you.”

“They’re extremely informative.”

“Right. I think toenails should be seen and not heard, personally.” Sherlock blinked, looked at her uncomprehendingly, and finally Joan relaxed enough to laugh and mean it; typical Sherlock. “Nevermind. Let go of my foot, you—”

“—madwoman?” Sherlock filled in, and Joan closed her mouth, shrugged.

“I think,” she said finally, “if you’re mad, so am I, so I think we should probably just accept that.”

“Yes,” said Sherlock, sliding back up Joan’s body, into her arms: this time it was easier, less shaking, less grasping, less scared. They kissed—long, slow.

Joan tucked her head into the hollow beneath Sherlock’s chin and felt her pulse leap beneath the skin of her throat—really leap, a pulsing, visible movement, where blood swelled beneath the skin and then pushed onwards. Then again. Then again. Fragile and forceful. Joan put her hand on her neck to better feel it. Sherlock tensed for a moment, then relaxed, for a moment brushing her fingers over Joan’s knuckles before her hand moved back down to Joan’s hip and held her there, tight.

She knew very well that when she had been thinking _I was in love with Persie_ a few nights, ago, what she had meant was, _I am in love with Sherlock_. She was a spy. She knew that avoiding a subject only made it conspicuous. That there was nothing so audible as the unsaid, nothing so obvious as the unthought. Lies were blatant. That was why you had to believe your own cover. She was a spy. She was too good too lie to herself.

There was no lightning strike to it, Joan thought, dull and slightly grim, slightly amazed by it all; there was no eureka shout, no sudden certainty. It wasn’t like Sherlock and her logic, her clattering calculations and moment of blank-eyed thought before she announced a deduction. No. Falling in love was like listening to an air raid with bated breath, as the bombs came crashing above and beyond you—lighting up the sky and searing the air. Your heart jumped at each bright, shuddering boom; each time, you thought, _this will be the last_ ; each time, you were wrong.

Until—.

Joan supposed there might come a time when she wouldn’t be startled by how she felt for Sherlock. When it would just be second nature. But she couldn’t imagine it.

Outside, the rain hadn’t stopped. Beneath Joan’s cheek, the pillow was damp.

“At some point,” Sherlock said, after a few long minutes of silence, her voice a little muffled by Joan’s hair and her breath warm on her scalp, “I suggest either getting dressed or making something of our current state. Again.”

“At some point,” Joan agreed, and the rain began to fall harder. She could feel the slow rise and fall of Sherlock’s chest; how her breath diffused through her. Everytime she exhaled, she stirred the hair atop Joan’s head.

Joan started to say _Sherlock_ and realised she couldn’t. Instead she said, “I need to tell you something.”

Sherlock didn’t reply, but she wasn’t asleep. Joan, pressed against her, felt a tiny tightening of Sherlock’s muscles; a glimpse of unease. Joan realised, suddenly, that what she had said had sounded romantic.

In fact, what she needed to tell Sherlock was, “I’ve been told to report back to London about you. There’s another W/T in the area they’re asking me to use. Callsign Judge, code name Louise.”

Slowly, the tension in Sherlock’s body diffused. Her hand skimmed along Joan’s hip. “Alright,” she said, very quietly. “What are you going to tell her?”

Joan closed her eyes, pushed her face into Sherlock’s throat. “That everything’s just fine.”

Sherlock breathed out in what was almost a laugh. Her thumb rubbed along the ridge of Joan’s hipbone. Then they settled, close and quiet.

* * *

By the time they stumbled out of bed, dawn was breaking; the city was rumbling to life. The electricity was out—Sherlock had said so even before Joan had tried the switch, though she had tried nonetheless through sheer stubbornness—and so the only light in the room was what came in through the shutters and lay in cold grey strips along the bare floorboards. The air was chill but sweaty. Joan sat on the floor and watched Sherlock talk, prowl, rub her hands through her hair.

“Possibly Moriarty,” Sherlock said, pointing, “possibly Moriarty, and possibly Moriarty.”

“Right,” said Joan. “Right. Why the floorboards?”

Sherlock pushed air out of her nose, and said, in a searching, sardonic tone, “ _Austerity?_ ”, with an irritable little click of the throat.

Joan smiled.

The three floorboards Joan had been referring to were not currently making up the floor, but had been pried up to reveal two things: a crawl space beneath the flooring and, on the undersides of each of the floorboards themselves, a veritable web of paper, string, pins. Each board was associated with one SOE agent in Professor. A board for Navigator; a board for Scientist; a board for Professor himself. 

It looked like police work, and for the most part, Sherlock kept it hidden—but Joan, in a horrified sort of way, rather admired how she had commandeered the secret space beneath the floorboards, and turned it into something _absurdly_ insecure. Making even the best practices of tradecraft extravagantly dangerous. What was Joan to do, if not smile at it?

She pulled herself in tight. She had mistakenly picked up Sherlock’s shirt instead of her own blouse, which was now hanging over Sherlock’s shoulders. Joan sat with the borrowed shirt half-buttoned and her woollen skirt stretched over her crossed legs.

“So this Moriarty is a German informant,” Joan said, speaking slowly, getting things straight, “and an SOE agent.”

“Yes, yes, we’ve been through—”

“Alright, alright, let me finish. Sherlock. There’s a German informant in the network.”

“Yes.”

“Have you,” Joan began, but Sherlock had stilled in her pacing and was giving her a look which Joan rather wished she didn’t understand. She tightened her jaw. “Alright,” she said, her voice grim and grudging. “You can’t alert Baker Street because at the first whisper of any kind of disturbance, Moriarty could have the entire network rolled up.”

“In an instant,” Sherlock said, and Joan tried to tell herself that it was ferocity, not excitement, in her voice.

“We need some security measures,” she said, still looking Sherlock dead in the eye. Sherlock started pacing again with a jerking movement like a nervy horse, her fingers stretching out by her sides.

“Security measures,” she muttered in a sneer, then when Joan opened her mouth, “yes, yes, fine, alright—”

“I’m not going to stay here, for one,” Joan said, and Sherlock rolled her shoulders back, cast a look at her, and brought her hands, palms together, up to her mouth. She kept pacing. Every time she came within a step of a wall she executed a neat military turn—Joan didn’t think she even knew she was doing it, had certainly never seen her do anything so martial intentionally.

“Alright,” she said, after one cool moment.

“And I don’t think you should know where I’m staying.”

Though of course, Sherlock would, and as much was transmitted in the sharp dawn-grey glance Sherlock shot at her, the glance which seemed to open a kind of crack in Joan’s chest. Joan licked her lips and looked away. “Safety signals,” she said. “Here. Hang a towel out of the parlour window if it’s safe.”

“And I imagine you want to set up a dead drop?”

“It could be helpful.”

“I doubt it would be secure. Better to communicate in person.”

Joan stared into the dark corner of the room, then looked up to Sherlock. “Okay,” she said. Sherlock’s eyes flickered across to her and she shrugged. “You know the situation better,” she pointed out. “And you can do your, you know. Genius thing.” Sherlock’s mouth twitched. “You think Moriarty could compromise a dead drop?”

“I think Moriarty thrives off confused communication, mistaken identity and animal panic at the idea of the unknown. At least when we’re speaking in person we know who we’re talking to.”

“I see.”

“Speaking of confused communication,” Sherlock carried on, doing one of her WAAF-stamped about-turns and crossing the room again in a few short strides, “ _codewords_.”

“Go on?”

“These work in speech and in writing. If I mention _une cycliste solitaire_ , we’ll meet the next day at eight in the tavern on the Rue des Bains. _Des camées du vatican_ means you should meet me in in the Rue de la Pompe, number fourteen, fourteen minutes past eight in the evening of the next Saturday. And if I mention _un ruban moucheté_ , you cut your losses, get word to Baker Street you need a flight back and leave the city immediately.”

Joan bit her lower lip and then released it, kissing her teeth. “And so do you,” she said, quietly and firmly. “If I use them. Yes?” Sherlock’s eyes glinted at her in the early morning gloom, and Joan decided to take it for acquiescence. “What’s the distress signal?”

“What?”

“If you need my help, what do you say then?”

Sherlock’s hard military turn as she reached the wall was her most aggressive and neatest yet. “ _La maison vide_ ,” she said, in an irritated, offhand way, as if she didn’t think it mattered.

“Good,” said Joan. “Glad we got that So. Moriarty. Which one do you think it is?” And she nodded towards the boards. Scientist—Navigator—Professor.

Sherlock stopped again, and looked surprised, as if she hadn’t expected the question. She looked from the boards to Joan. Joan said, “What? Surely that’s what we’re trying to work out?”

“There’s no _data_ ,” Sherlock said, her face crumpled in what looked like genuine bewilderment. “Or there’s an abundance of data, but it’s neutral data. How am I supposed to theorise with a scarcity of facts?”

“There’s plenty of data—come on, okay. Navigator, tell me about—her?” Joan leaned forwards to squint at the board and nodded, seeing that Sherlock had described Navigator as a her in one of her scrawled assessments. “Tell me about her.”

Sherlock sighed, hissed out her breath, rubbed her fingers through her hair. “Courier. Involved in Mme Cammaerts’ black market network, probably. Both moonlighting and gathering information. A good liar, but not quite a good spy.”

“No?”

“She changed completely once we got out of public,” Sherlock muttered, waving her fingers through the air. “When it comes to her cover, she was was acting, not—”

“Not being.”

“Mm.”

“Is that suspicious?”

“Of course it’s suspicious,” Sherlock said. “But they’re all suspicious.”

“Why?”

Sherlock gave a small, mocking _hn_ of a laugh. “Professor,” Sherlock said, pointing at the relevant board, “is suspicious through his absence. Only Navigator has any contact with him, and that’s indirect. Dead drops. Never any go-betweens. Or so she says, and I’m inclined to believe her.”

“So he sticks to the shadows.”

“But what else is a spy to do? Scientist, meanwhile, meets some unknown contact in a boarding house at eleven minutes past two in the afternoon every Saturday. I’ve followed him twice, and had an associate follow him for me once—”

“Who?”

“Oh. One of my contacts has an eight-year-old daughter.”

“ _Eight_?”

“Yes. What?”

Joan rubbed her face, shook her head. “Nothing. Isn’t that typical for a spy, though?”

“Oh, yes. But whatever he’s doing, he’s not reporting back to Baker Street about it.”

Joan looked up. Raised her eyebrows. “Sher—” she began, and then she paused and said, “Victoire,” her tone saying, _tell me you don’t mean what I think you mean_. 

The cryptonym seemed to have more of an impact on Sherlock than the almost-utterance of her real name. The line of her mouth quaked irritably downwards. Still, she spread her hands in an attempt to seem careless, which immediately confirmed to Joan that she knew exactly what the problem was. “I’m a wireless operator. All messages back to London _have_ to come through me.”

“Yeah, and they’re meant to be coded when they get to you, so that all you do is transmit the encrypted version.”

“It’s not my fault if I notice a pattern.”

“It’s pretty definitely your fault if you use it to break Scientist’s codes.”

“Is it really so insecure to know what they’re all telling London?”

“ _Yes_.”

Sherlock seemed to think about this for a while, her eyebrows up and her lips pursed. Then she shrugged, and it seemed conclusive. Joan sighed, and couldn’t help smiling, just a little.

“Okay,” she said. “If you think it’s worth knowing. We’re not exactly operating with Baker Street’s full and informed permission.”

“No. Not at all. Thankfully.”

“So we need to work out why Navigator is so dishonest—”

“Mm,” said Sherlock.

“What?”

“Unless of course it’s because spies aren’t known for their honesty.”

“Well, we also need to know why Professor keeps so distant—”

“Unless of course it’s because that’s just healthy paranoia for an organiser who has already lost a number of agents—”

“And who Scientist is meeting in the boarding house—”

“Unless of course it’s just one of his above-board contacts, and he hasn’t reported back yet because he’s waiting for the relationship to come to fruition, intelligence-wise.”

Joan frowned at her, confused. “Are you defending them?”

“No,” said Sherlock, and she fixed Joan with a brilliant stare, her eyes gleaming. She looked bright—shining. “Just not oversimplifying them. Don’t you think it’s _interesting_?” Apparently she took Joan’s steady look as an invitation to continue, starting forwards—dropping suddenly to the floor, to Joan’s level, and almost reaching out for her. “Of course they’re all suspicious. That’s their job. Of course they’re all lying, untrustworthy shadows of people. That’s—”

“Our job too,” Joan said, and Sherlock seemed to finally realise that Joan’s expression was sceptical, not appreciative. She blinked and sank back, looking a little put out, and a little irritated.

“Yes,” she said. “Well.”

Joan shook her head, and Sherlock sighed; got up again, starting once more to cut up the room with quickening strides. She kept one hand at her hip and the other in her hair; the muscles of her legs were coltish, fast-pistoning.

After a few moments, Joan said, “Yves, the W/T who got arrested—how did he know the name Moriarty? Why is it important?”

From the way Sherlock stopped and smiled—not with much humour—Joan knew she had asked the right question.

“Moriarty contacted him,” Sherlock said, folding her arms and aiming her gaze at Joan, settling her weight on one hip. A faint self-satisfaction radiated from her.

Slowly, Joan leaned back. “Okay,” she said. “That doesn’t make much sense. Why?”

“Yves wasn’t stupid, he’d only pass on the name if there was some way to link it back to the person and use it as evidence against them. Don’t you think? So it’s a name Moriarty is aware of, possibly a name Moriarty invented. I really don’t think Yves was able to get his hands on German records of informants, and nor do I imagine that Moriarty’s stupid, which means that whatever Yves knew, he got on Moriarty’s terms. Of course it was never a face-to-face meeting, he didn’t know who Moriarty was, but I can imagine—a sabotaged dead drop, a go-between, something like that.”

“I meant why would Moriarty contact him.”

“Oh, well.” Sherlock’s mouth tugged upwards in a smile. “Wouldn’t you?”

“What?”

“Think about it. Moriarty’s playing London and Berlin off each other while sitting in Occupied France and having a grand old time.”

“Yes?”

“Wouldn’t you get bored of things being so—easy?” When Joan stared at her, Sherlock shrugged, and said, “I would.”

“Right,” said Joan. “And we’re chasing Moriarty, not you.”

“Yes,” Sherlock agreed, looking at the boards leaning against the bed. There was something thoughtful in the set of her jaw which Joan wasn’t sure she liked. “Yes, that’s right.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof! I'm about twenty minutes late, and there are no historical notes this time around; mea culpa. Thanks for reading! The next chapter will be here on the 13th of January, by which time all my plans for later chapters will be _completely jossed_. I'm looking forward to it. Have a good series three!


	21. Louise.

After just over two weeks of Joan lying low in a greasy rented attic room, holding her breath each time someone opened the door two storeys below, Sherlock left Joan alone in the top room in the Rue Ghislaine for fourteen hours. When she came back she had a set of French documents verifying Joan’s cover, the origins of which she wouldn’t explain. She also had a transmission from London. Joan decoded it. London didn’t waste words on lengthy excoriations, just slightly petulantly informed her that they were _aware of changes in plans_. They then gave a lengthy and somewhat meandering series of instructions and suggestions. They were all pointless. All they did was mask one important piece of information: that Joan should make contact with the wireless operator Judge on Saturday, in the Rue Bernard.

As she fed the message to the fire and watched the paper crumple and blacken, Joan thought with some unease that it was strange that London should have gone to so much trouble to hide the instruction from Sherlock when the message was already encoded in Joan’s particular code. Perversely, it only made her gladder that she had told Sherlock of Judge’s existence and London’s instructions. She watched the message burn; she didn’t think about treason.

On Saturday, Joan stood at the top end of the Rue Bernard and wondered if there had been some issue with the Morse, or an error in her decoding of the message which had included the address. The street was clean, bright, well-oiled; living propaganda for the German occupation. There was a smart hotel at the opposite end, and the rest of the buildings were private houses. It was quiet. The silence stretched out like a long breathless wait. The cobbles had a buttery sheen to them and silent, smooth-lined motorcars—green, black, white, brown, yellow—stood smartly outside tall, elegant buildings. One of the cars had a small red, white and black flag attached to it, fluttering innocently in the gentle breeze.

Constructing a story to spout in case she was wrong after all— _I’m sorry, I’m lost, où est…?_ —Joan stuck her chin forwards and walked onwards. Still hatless, still rural-looking, she knew she was out of place. She was glad of it. It was a better disguise than trying and failing to blend in seamlessly, and she was under no obligation to look comfortable.

The address she had been given was number 14. It was one of many pale, proud, private buildings standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the street, and while it wasn’t the grandest, it had a certain self-sufficient dignity. Separating the house from its neighbour on the right was a paved side-path which lead down to a startlingly green garden, and a discreet tradesman’s entrance.

Joan, as she had been instructed, did not ring but knocked.

Sally opened the door.

For a moment, they stared at each other. Then Sally said, “Are you here about the needlework?”

Of course she said that; it was her part of the password exchange. Shocked out of herself but still able to remember basic security, Joan managed to say, perfectly naturally, “If the work’s still on offer.”

“Come through,” said Sally, and turned to lead her in.

Sally looked neat. Dark grey dress, flat shoes, clean fingernails, neat hair; not in uniform, but certainly the fact of being an employee was written all throughout her manner and dress. Joan watched her shoulders move as Sally led her into a small, slightly dank but nonetheless cosy room at the back of the house. Then shut and bolted the door. Then turned.

For a moment, they just looked at each other, Sally with her arms crossed over her chest and her fingers tight in the fabric of her own sleeves, and Joan feeling like time itself had tumbled away from her. Sally, _here_. Logically, it made sense, of course; and yet Joan had been thinking of her as a fixture of the past.

Apparently Sally had been thinking something similar about Joan. “I can’t believe they sent _you_ ,” she said—not cruelly or with distaste, but with plain frankness. It pulled Joan back into the present moment, and flooded her with a kind of relief; of course, you could count on Sally to be sensible about things.

“They didn’t, quite,” Joan said, shrugging: _I know it’s ridiculous_. “Louise.” She had to say the cryptonym aloud to remind herself.

“Juliette.”

“Yes. What are you doing here?”

Sally gave a soft snort, coming away from the door and moving to the desk which sat before the window, and which took up most of the space in the room. There were also two sofas crammed up against a low coffee table. All the available surfaces were covered in paper. When Joan looked closely, they were pamphlets: against the proliferation of Jazz and Unhealthy Living; against the Jews and Un-Patriotic Thought; against the Unclean Lifestyles Espoused By Youth. On the cover of the pamphlet against jazz was a caricature of a Negro man with huge, cartoonish lips clamped about his saxophone. Joan’s jaw tightened, and she looked to Sally.

“Managing the house and affairs of Mme Agathe Larousse,” said Sally, flicking idly through papers on the desk. “Heard of her?”

“No.”

“Society sort. Lots of pamphlets and parties. Heard of Ange?”

“The Resistance source in high society? Yes.” Sally turned to her, raised her eyebrows meaningfully, and Joan said, “No. What, really?”

“Really. Her late husband had a lot of political friends which she inherited, and now she’s the darling of the Reich in Paris, and has a lot of information to pass on to those that can use it. She’s also more than willing to house a British spy. It’s more or less the perfect cover.”

“Is it?”

Sally impassively rearranged pamphlets for a few moments, stacking the like piles atop each other. “Well.” Her voice was calm. “ _While it lasts_ it’s more or less the perfect cover.”

Finally, Joan laughed, and it wasn’t just desperation. “God,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”

Sally put her hands on her hips, looked downwards towards the desk, and kissed her teeth. “Let’s crack on,” she said, after a moment of flinty silence.

Joan sobered, swallowed, and said, “Okay, yeah. Let’s.”

“Take a seat,” Sally said, and they sat down on opposite sofas, knees jammed against the coffee table and its glossy, vitriolic hoard of pamphlets. “You know the situation with Knight.”

“Yes.”

“Good. You should know that Baker Street’s not prejudiced against any of Knight’s information. They just want to be sure of it.”

Something about that made Joan lick her lips uneasily. She looked from a pamphlet on Unsavoury Practices amongst the Youth of France to Sally’s face, but of course Sally’s face never betrayed anything. “Got it,” Joan said.

“Good. So. We won’t meet in person again. I suggest a system of alternating dead drops. One at the church on the Rue Bossuet; kneel in the second to last pew on the right hand side, far from the aisle, and there’s a space beneath you can store papers in. One in the ladies’ bathroom of the Quartier Bleu cafe; there’s a loose tile behind the cistern.”

For a few moments, they plotted this. Joan knew a woman named Jeanette who would put out towels on her balcony to correspond to whether a drop had been made or not; Sally suggested they should try to carry out the exchanges on Wednesdays and Saturdays. They calculated times, dates, likelihoods, spinning the web of strange intersections and apparent coincidence which was the base element of all good spycraft.

Joan said, finally, “You know who Knight is, don’t you.”

Sally pursed her lips and allowed silence to settle in like a chill. Joan’s heart, which hadn’t been overly buoyed up in the first place, gave a sudden, unexpected jolt downwards. Though her pause had been eloquent enough, Sally nonetheless said, “I can guess.”

Joan nodded slowly. “Well then,” she said, and then licked her lips, feeling her mouth dry and clumsy. Sally looked away.

Honestly, Joan thought there was no more to be said. She was conscious of her next objective and her tight schedule, and was on the verge of standing up when Sally said, “It’s good to see you too, you know,” in a worn-through voice, rubbing at her temple with two fingers.

Slowly, Joan sat back.

“What’s it been like?” she asked.

“You know I can’t say.”

“I s’pose not.”

There was a long, grim pause. Joan stared industriously at the pamphlets, the coffee table, anywhere save Sally, who finally stood up, straightening her grey skirt across her knees. Joan rose too, clasping her hands behind her back for a moment before she realised she was standing like a soldier. Sally moved back to the desk and opened a drawer; from it, she pulled a bag bulging with fabric. Needlework. Joan’s cover for being here.

“Mme Larousse doesn’t know of our connection, or of the existence of a wider network of British agents in Paris,” she said, holding it out. Joan took it.

“It’ll give me something to do,” she said, meaning _I wouldn’t trust her either_.

* * *

Sherlock lay stretched out on Michel’s narrow boarding-house bed and closed her eyes.

It hadn’t been hard to get in. She had taken a room herself and picked the lock with ease, rather pleased to be faced with something so simple to resolve. After letting herself in, she had locked it again.

Michel, Scientist, that elusive Professor agent, came to this narrow, dusty room every second Saturday to meet a man of unknown name and unknown allegiance. Originally, Sherlock had planned to send her newly-sent courier to deal with him directly. Then Joan had appeared in Paris.

And speaking of: Sherlock’s mouth curved in a smile as she heard Joan’s tread on the stairs, and unwound herself in order to stand, crossing to the door and opening it before Joan could knock.

“Hate it when you do that,” Joan murmured to her, standing in the doorway. From the colour of the dust on her shoes, she had been somewhere up-market. There was a bag of needlework slung under her arm; her cover, Sherlock supposed.

“What,” Sherlock said, “show the barest glimmer of intelligence?”

Joan _tch_ ’ed and jerked her head even as she slipped into the room: “Alright, out. I’ve got everything.”

“I can see.” The gun hidden inside Joan’s jacket was invisible, but the way she carried herself when armed wasn’t. Sherlock closed the door, locked it again. 

Joan blinked her gas-blue eyes, and looked from Sherlock’s hand to her face.

“I thought you were leaving,” she said.

Sherlock shrugged. “Rather more fun if I stay, don’t you think? There’s space under the bed for two. Or the wardrobe’s rather—”

“ _No_.”

Attic rooms, Sherlock thought irrelevantly in the silence which followed; they were cursed to live out their lives in attic rooms, weren’t they? In this one the fading light went slanting across the floor and washed out the wallpaper to a sickly off-white. Joan was staring at her with her jaw set like rock, her shoulders in the cast of an officer. “No,” she said again.

“Compelling argument,” Sherlock said, “but I remain unconvinced.”

“Are you kidding me, Sherlock?” It was the first time Joan had let Sherlock’s name come out of her mouth since they had been in France. Sherlock saw her blink in the split second when she couldn’t disguise her surprise at herself. She recovered quickly. “We had a plan.”

“Yes, past tense—”

“You’d let any other courier do this,” Joan said. “Why not me?”

Sherlock opened her mouth, but words stuck in her throat; she paused, blinked, looked at Joan, who—with her tight shoulders, tight jaw, stern stare—looked immovable. Sherlock’s tongue was dry, prickling. 

“I,” she said, her voice quiet and rough, startled into a protest; but there were creaks on the stairs and they both stiffened, straightening—Sherlock, at least, hadn’t quite been aware of leaning in.

Joan didn’t waste time on swearing or blame, just grabbed Sherlock’s shoulder and pushed her towards the wardrobe, saying, “Shut up, get in.” Sherlock clambered in, reached out, pulled Joan in with her, then the wardrobe door was shut. There was only a strip of brightness in the whole world.

Sherlock pressed her eye to the gap and saw Michel. She sank back into the shadows barely holding back a hiss, her eyes closing, and realised she was gripping Joan’s upper arms. In the near-black, she shook her head: _not his contact_.

Not according to plan. None of this was. Sherlock had been hoping for Michel’s unknown contact to arrive first. As it was, they would have to deal with both of them.

It didn’t help that Joan’s question was repeating itself in Sherlock’s mind. _Why not me?_ There was the creak of bedsprings as Michel sat down. Sherlock hadn’t let go of Joan’s arms. The minutes seemed to shiver by, drawn out into an endless, breathless age. _Why not Joan?_

Because she was Joan, of course, and yet that wasn’t—really—an answer.

Finally, there was the sound of a man coming up the stairs outside. Sherlock didn’t lean to press her eye to the gap again, and gripped harder at Joan’s shoulders when she bent to try, stopping her in her tracks. Instead, Sherlock listened.

Footsteps. Her heart was leaping. Why not me? Because Joan couldn’t be spared, of course—and now Michel was speaking. “You’re late.”

“Not all of us have easy jobs.” The man’s voice was low, rough, with a strange edge to it Sherlock couldn’t place. Almost soft. Joan had gone stiff. _Why not Joan?_ Because if Joan was going to do anything, Sherlock wanted to be there. To enjoy her company or to take a bullet Sherlock wasn’t sure. One of the two. Both. Her heart was shuddering in her chest. Things were connecting in her mind. Her lips were quivering. There was something to realise. She could taste it.

The floorboards were creaking, whining, under footsteps. The two men were drawing closer to each other. Sherlock heard, “Mon—” and one of those sounds only produced against the press of a warm mouth.

She couldn’t help it; it all made too much sense. She said, “Oh,” aloud and the world froze.

Then events began to tumble over each other in a race to happen first. Joan drew her gun, and Michel’s contact, Michel’s lover, threw open the door, shouted in French, grabbed Sherlock by her collar. Michel surged forwards, metal glinting in his hand. Sherlock twisted out of the other man’s grip. Her fist connected with his jaw, the impact jarring up her shoulder.

Michel said, “ _Alexandre_ ,” and Joan said, “Touch her again and I _will_ kill you,” in a voice which carried, in English.

They all breathed out slowly. Michel was pointing his gun at Sherlock’s chest. Joan was pointing hers at Michel’s forehead. And Alexandre, Michel’s contact—Michel’s lover—was hunch-shouldered, hand at his jaw, having stumbled away. Sherlock realised her knuckles were bleeding, though she couldn’t feel anything at all.

“British?” Michel choked in English, not lowering his gun, a cold horror in his voice. He was slight, dark, clammy-looking, with sweat shining in every line on his young face.

“Both of us,” Joan acknowledged. “Put the gun down.”

“You first.”

“That isn’t going to happen.” Joan nodded towards Alexandre. “Is he conscious?”

“I speak English,” Alexandre said. He was a heavy-set young man with tawny hair and a voice slightly too high for his body, a voice thick now with both Gallic accent and pain. His dark eyes flashed as he wiped his mouth and cast Sherlock a disgusted look. Bruises were coming up on his jaw like purple roses of broken blood vessels. Sherlock gave a dismissive twitch of the head, looking away and straightening her jacket collar where he had creased it. Her fingers were steady but they felt numb. She was blinking quickly, eyelashes fluttering.

“He knows I’m English,” Michel said, and then when Joan just stared at him—and while Sherlock stared at Joan—he grimaced, and said, “Yes, yes, he knows—”

“I don’t give a damn about how many rules you’ve broken,” Joan said, and lowered her gun first. Sherlock twitched and nearly leapt for her, or in front of her—the trusting fool—but Michel, too, dropped his hand, his pistol glinting by his side instead. He looked unsteady on his feet now, his damp, pallid face sickly and horror-struck.

“Oh,” Sherlock said, rocking back on the balls of her feet as she finally realised what he was so worried about; “oh, you think we’ll _tell_.” It was a schoolgirlish turn of phrase—they were still speaking English—surprised out of her by an almost hilarious amazement that Michel would care, and by her disconnect from the situation at hand; she felt only half-involved, dazed. She had so much to think about, like: _why not Joan?_ and _why had Edith Whistler missed her train?_ “Misunderstanding. We’re in much the same set of circumstances. _Angeline_ , shall we go?”

Alexandre stepped closer again. Michel’s pistol twitched as he gripped it tighter. Joan shot Sherlock a hard look. Sherlock said, “What?”

Michel said, suddenly, “You’re Knight, aren’t you. Reine. Whatever. The W/T Georgette complains about.”

Joan’s jaw looked strung tighter than a violin string, and her eyes suddenly crackled with blue flame. When she spoke, her voice was terrifyingly calm. “Good idea, that, splashing code names around in front of strangers.”

“I’m Resistance,” Alexandre muttered, still nursing his jaw. In French, he added, “Like you people have any idea of security anyway, like any of it actually stops you getting killed—” When he spoke French, his voice was more fluid, and his cheeks gained a flush of urgent, angry colour which made him look younger. His throat was working and Sherlock realised he was as terrified as Michel.

“What the hell were you doing?” Michel asked, nearly spat, with all the vitriol of a man unsure which questions to ask first. “And what do you mean, _in the same circumstances_?”

“We thought you were involved in something which you clearly aren’t,” Sherlock said, in a barking tone. Joan was staring with disbelief at her. “ _Angeline_ ,” Sherlock insisted, moving towards the door; it was a struggle not to say Joan, especially when Sherlock’s thoughts were screaming for attention, her brain throwing itself off the walls of her skull. Why had Edith Whistler missed her train? _Because_ —

Joan turned to Michel, and said, “For God’s sake, change where you meet.” Then she caught up Sherlock and grabbed her arm, like she never did; like they never felt the need to. Sherlock blinked at her, then acquiesed. Good idea.

Michel stared between them. “Dieu,” Alexandre groaned. They left the two man standing in the centre of the tiny, cheap room, the sunlight behind them turning them to shadows.

“Split up,” said Joan, releasing Sherlock’s arm and pushing her down the corridor. Her voice was full of tradecraft and nothing else. “Get out by the back door. The window. Whatever. I’ll come by the Rue Ghislaine later.”

Sherlock looked hazily at her. “Yes. Alright.” Joan’s jaw was taut. She looked rather like she had done in those early days at Wanborough, with her teeth clenched against pain. Sherlock didn’t look away, though Joan’s eyes burned fierce. She opened her mouth to say more—but Joan executed a military turn and disappeared down the stairs.

* * *

_Why not me if you touch her I will kill you a good man not me why not why did Edith Whistler miss her these things happen in France if you touch her I will—_

Sherlock locked herself in the top room in the Rue Ghislaine and saw it all.

Corentin. Robert Walthamstow. Anton Durant. A good man. A hero-organiser, English as roses until he had to be something else, and that rarest thing—a noble spy. A golden boy, everyone’s favourite legend; out of his time, should have fought some more beautiful, more poetic, more distant war. Forty years old, married, and in love with young Edith Whistler of the bright, animated face, Edie Whistler with her pretty middle class sturdiness and the stubbornness of either a child or a brilliant operative.

Because he _had_ loved her, hadn’t he?

It was the second of January. That night, a train was going to be blown up, Corentin was going to die, and Edith Whistler was going to miss her flight because of trouble on the railways. But first: first, Corentin would have recieved a message.

How? Sherlock wondered. How would Moriarty have delivered it?

The explanation arrived easily: via dead-drop, because Moriarty would never come out into the open. A message had appeared in one of Corentin’s dead-drop locations. Possibly Alain or Yves had even put it there. Edith wouldn’t have played runner to Moriarty—not because of anything to do with Edith’s moral fibre, but because it suited Moriarty’s aim that Edith should remain stainless. 

So, that night, the second of January. It was cold to the bone, a starry frost turning everything to crystal, and Corentin probably found it hard to open the message. Stiff fingers. Getting old. He would think, perhaps, of Edith, at this junction. Of course the message was encoded, probably even in Yves’ handwriting—the more Sherlock thought about it, the more she thought that Yves, yes, must have been the one to pass it on, because he had known the name Moriarty—and Corentin must have thought, at first, that it was a transmission from London. 

Strange, though, to receive it tonight, when he had arranged for Edith to be flown back to England; when Edith was already on her way, her pretty English face turned towards pretty English shores, probably already thinking of her first cup of tea, hugging her mother, wearing proper leather shoes again.

The exact phrasing of the message would never be discovered and could never be deduced. Corentin would have burnt it immediately after reading it. He was, after all, a good spy as well as a good man. The meaning, though, Sherlock could see as clearly as if it were written on the inside of her eyelids. The message would impart two pieces of information: firstly, that the location of Edith’s pick-up spot was compromised, and that if she went—no, when she went—she would be captured, tortured for information, deported to Germany and worked to death.

Secondly, that there was only one way to prevent her going.

Corentin had believed it. Why not? Moriarty was already doing the impossible—talking to him in his own code, a secret he had kept well. It was clear that he was already trapped, and Corentin was too clever to exhaust himself in trying to escape. Had there been clearer instructions as to what Moriarty wanted him to do? Sherlock thought perhaps there had been, but Moriarty hadn’t spelt it out. No, Moriarty had taken pleasure in making Corentin join the dots himself. Perhaps some advice had been given on timing; that was the sort of thing one couldn’t leave to the discretion of ordinary people. Perhaps there had been a word or two on explosives, and how best to ascertain that the entire train and track would be compromised.

(‘Compromised’. _Destroyed_.)

Corentin had been a devil with a rifle but a fool with explosives. Had it been a mistake?

No. Even a fool with explosives could choose to run. Corentin had taken them from Resistance stores—SOE-funded anyway—and loaded himself up. And he had snuck onboard the train, the tips of his fingers and his nose numb with January frost, explosives weighing down his clothes. Thinking, Sherlock supposed, of Edith, all the while. These things happen in France.

It was the second of January, a cold night. A train had been blown up. Corentin had died. Edith Whistler had missed her flight.

Sherlock opened her eyes, and saw the empty room before her. She let out her breath.

“Elegant,” she said aloud, very softly. “But why order the rescue flights?”

Downstairs, there was the creak of a door; footsteps. Mme Cammaerts’ voice rose and fell; Joan’s voice remained steady, words inaudible. Slowly, Sherlock got to her feet, rubbing a hand through her hair, as Joan’s footsteps came louder and closer, making the stairs groan. She walked with that calm, purposeful speed she always avoided in public. No, not always. Just in France. But when you were in France, France was the world.

Sherlock muttered, “Come in,” and turned away from the door, hand at her mouth. Joan did so; a glimmer of bright gold and grey at the corner of Sherlock’s eye. She shut and locked the door.

“You idiot,” was the first thing she said, and Sherlock’s mouth twitched; her eyes slid to Joan.

“A miscalculation,” Sherlock offered, but Joan said, “You _stupid, thoughtless, reckless_ —”

Sherlock flinched.

“How do you know,” Joan was continuing, her voice tight and bitterly controlled, “that he’s not Moriarty? Because Moriarty can’t be a queer? Because Moriarty can’t have a cover story that involves sleeping with a Resistance man?”

“Because Moriarty would never be so utterly foolish,” Sherlock said, “as to sleep with someone in France, for whatever reason.”

Joan’s cheeks were very white, with no flush whatsoever in her face; almost grey-tinged. Even her hair looked a little washed out. “Yeah,” she said, letting her breath out slowly. Her voice sounded a little tight. “Clever Moriarty.”

“Clever Moriarty,” Sherlock agreed.

Joan’s voice was colourless as she said, “So it’s Navigator or Professor.”

“Yes,” Sherlock said, rubbing her lower lip. 

There was a long silence. Joan came forwards a few steps, and Sherlock blinked at her, lowering her hand. Her mouth shaped, silently, the first syllable of Sherlock, and then she swallowed it, her lips thinning out. She said, instead: “You had an idea, back there. You were thinking of something.”

Sherlock blinked once. Thought of Corentin. _If you touch her I will_ —. “It was nothing,” she said. “Nothing new.”

Joan moved back slowly, keeping her eyes on Sherlock and tightening her jaw. “Okay,” she said finally, her voice oddly-shaped. Sherlock frowned slightly. “Well. I have messages for you to transmit. Navigator, Professor, Scientist, all of them.”

“Good. Hand them over.”

As Joan sorted through the paper in her bag and dealt the coded messages like cards onto Sherlock’s desk, she said, a little raggedly, and with something angry but oddly like disgust in her tone, “God. Poor bloke.”

Sherlock didn’t know what to say, so she said, “Mm?”

But Joan just exhaled through her nose and gave a jerk of the head. Not quite a shake. Sherlock watched her rifle through messages with a sinking feeling.

Finally, Joan broke the silence again, and this time her voice was locked-down again, colourless and militarty. “What happened with Michel is going to cause problems.”

“I know.”

“How long have we got before we’re pulled out?”

“I don’t know,” Sherlock said. Joan smacked the last message down on the desk and straightened up with a brutal economy of movement.

“When are we next meeting?” she asked, not meeting Sherlock’s eyes. Sherlock frowned at the side of her face, pursing her lips. Her mouth felt very dry.

“What?” she said.

Joan turned, mouth wrenching to one side in one of her hard, angry smiles. Their gazes didn’t so much meet as collide. Sherlock tightened her jaw.

“If we weren’t here, Sherlock,” Joan said taking a step forwards and raising one hand, index finger pointing at Sherlock’s heart, “if we hadn’t met in such _stupid_ circumstances—”

“And yet we have.”

Joan exhaled through her nose, long and shuddering. Sherlock’s split knuckles had finally begun to ache, though by now the blood had dried.

Slowly, Joan lowered her hand. It looked like she was forcing herself. “Yes,” she said, clipped and short. “Yes, we have. Right. I’m going back.”

Without moving any other part of her body, Sherlock followed Joan to the door with her eyes. “Wait,” she snapped, and Joan paused with her hand on the doorknob. But all Sherlock said was, “Two pm tomorrow, the Rue de l’Assomption. The convent. Ask for Reine.”

“Fine.”

Joan’s knuckled were blanched on the doorknob. She opened her mouth, but Sherlock turned her back sharply and moved to the desk to poke through the messages Joan had left there.

Behind her, there came a long, forced exhale, the creak and click of the door, and then the dull pats of footsteps. Sherlock lifted up one of the messages. It was a mistake; it made her see how her hands were shaking. She stared at the strings of letters and thought: _these things happen in France_ and _if you touch her I_ will—.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! This is...fourteen minutes late (and counting, perhaps). Oops. The next chapter will be published on January 27th! And...not the 28th, as I originally wrote. Calendars are difficult and I need to sleep more.


	22. Le Monocle

It was one in the afternoon, the day after Joan had met with Sally, and the day after the mess she and Sherlock had caused with Michel and his lover. Joan was in Montmartre, where the cold sun was setting the cobbles aflame with golden light, and where German soldiers on leave walked in neat groups, straight-backed and handsome, laughing. 

Of course Montmartre had carried on. In the daylight, the cafes bustled. At night, the cabarets did well with German custom. They were run under new regulations, but they were still lit up at night, turning the whole hillside into a jewellery box: red, blue, gold: girls, boys, music. 

Le Monocle was closed.

The muscles at the back of her calves burning from her hike up the hill, Joan waited in line at a cafe opposite the club building. It didn’t look right in the sunlight, the glare showing every peeling crack in the paint and the incoherence of the weather-torn sign. 

Joan thought about Sherlock.

_If we hadn’t met in such stupid circumstances—_

If they hadn’t met in such stupid circumstances things would have been easier, Joan sometimes thought. The stakes would have been lower. There would have been time to try things differently, time to do things more normally: to drink, to dance, or even to argue. To have a blazing row and then come back to each other, their anger burnt off and leaving them raw and tired and looking for each other. But there was no time for that in France. Joan felt the war was holding her heart to ransom. She was catching at every single moment, determined to make it matter, not wanting to push Sherlock in case (she made herself think it, quite levelly blinking up at the sign) in case she never saw her again. 

And yet. 

_If we hadn’t met in such stupid circumstances—_

Then Sherlock would never have said _enjoy yourself_ instead of _goodbye_ , and Joan would never have felt that sudden loosening in her chest like a cork had been popped or a gate unstuck: enjoy yourself. And if they hadn’t met in such stupid circumstances Sherlock would never have thrown herself off a high beam, into the gleaming dark, to make Joan throw down her stick and run; would never have kissed her in the blackout. Joan wouldn’t have ever picked up a gun again. And Sherlock would have probably been bored to death by the cold, hard onward grind of life—and Joan too. Bored. She would have been bored.

_If we hadn’t met in such stupid circumstances—_

But they had.

The wind whipped Joan’s skirt against her knees, and against the flaking sign of Le Monocle knocked a branch from a nearby tree. A few flushed, flaming leaves still bristled there, rasping as they moved. As she watched, one fluttered, ripped itself free, and fell. The wind didn’t catch it.

Joan turned away and asked a man for the time. He said it was half past one. Joan nodded, thanked him, and went to meet Sherlock.

* * *

“Reine?” said a young, bespectacled nun with inkstains on her fingers and a pen on a chain around her neck, knocking against her crucifix. They were in a backroom of the convent, in the sort of office which, despite a surprising vaulted ceiling, having formerly been a cloister or some such thing, wouldn’t have looked out of place in Baker Street. It was similarly makeshift and hard-working, with nervous stress lingering like a vinegary fragrance on the air. Joan, feeling uncomfortably Anglican, found herself wondering what sort of paperwork a convent had to do anyway, really.

“Reine,” she confirmed, not voicing her question.

“I’m afraid we haven’t seen her,” the nun said, fussing with her pen on a chain—then realising it was there, hanging blasphemously beside Christ on the cross, and quickly whipped it off, dropping it onto the table. “No, ah, no, we haven’t seen her. I’m sorry.”

“Could I wait?” Joan asked.

“Of course,” the nun chirped, then blinked at her a little owlishly.

“Here,” Joan clarified, after a moment’s patient pause. “Could I wait here? In this office?”

“Oh! Yes. Yes, of course.”

So Joan sat on an uncomfortable chair, hands in her lap, while the nun, whose name was Sister Bernadette, hunched happily over her work and made delicate, precise little marks on the papers before her. Joan licked her lips and tried not to look at either the clock or the huge crucifix on the wall, where Jesus was frozen mid-yell. The ticks of the clock, however, pervaded her mind. 

Her lip was between her teeth.

At half two, she said, “Does she definitely always come here? I mean, to this office?”

“Reine? Oh, yes. Um, girl with the curly hair? Quite sharp?”

“That’s her.”

“Yes. She always comes here first.”

Joan nodded, and dug her fingernails into her palm.

At a quarter to three, she said, “Tell her I was here,” and got up, and when she got into the Rue de l’Assomption the sunlight and fresh, biting autumn air hit her in the face, took the tightness from her chest: she’d been an idiot to worry. Sherlock had forgotten; had had a brainwave and spent hours pacing about her tiny attic room with her fingers pressed against her mouth, her temples. Joan breathed deep, filled her lungs with the scent of fallen leaves, and went striding onwards.

She did her job, first and foremost. She emptied Sally’s dead-drop, the one in the church—today, it seemed, was a day for the misuse of holy ground—and found a coded message from Baker Street. She tucked it into her needlework bag in the empty church, and left. She would take it back to her lodgings and decode it there.

She would walk back to her lodgings via the Rue Ghislaine, but only because it was the quickest path.

When Joan reached the Rue Ghislaine, of course, she glanced up. The shutters in Sherlock’s windows were closed. The street was silent, empty; the wind blew dirt and grit across the pavement, because there were no trees to shed leaves. Joan walked, not quite feeling her body, and reached the end of the street before she realised what it was that was wrong. The window of the parlour, which faced the street, was open, and there was no smoke. Not the faintest haze. Mme Cammaerts’ stove was out. 

She must have walked back to the house—she didn’t run, she wasn’t out of breath when she reached the door—but she had no memory of it. The next thing she was aware of was the front door creaking open under her hand. She didn’t rush. Her heart beat slowly. She climbed the stairs. 

There in the shadowy parlour was Mme Cammaerts, a black shape hunched in her usual chair in the corner, beside the extinguished stove. Joan stood, her breath working itself in and out of her lungs with staggered stubbornness.

Slowly, Mme Cammaerts lifted her eyes. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“Where is she,” Joan replied and the old woman shut her eyes tight. “Where is she.”

“You know where she is,” said Mme Cammaerts.

Joan opened her mouth to say _oh God_ , or _no_ , because that was the sort of thing people said in these circumstances. Instead she gave a choking, heaving laugh, stopped short; swallowed. “No,” she said. “No, shut _up_.” Speaking English. She checked herself, returned to French: “She’s not.”

“It happened last night,” said Mme Cammaerts, and suddenly it was real; suddenly Joan was reeling, grabbing onto the side of the table, the world tipping sideways. She hauled in her breath, forced herself into steadiness.

“Tell me,” she said, and Mme Cammaerts told her.

It had happened last night. Joan had left. Sherlock had gone out to transmit the messages Joan had brought her. Then she had come back. Mme Cammaerts had gone to bed—and perhaps Sherlock had, too. Why should she know, Mme Cammaerts asked—the girl was a law unto herself. Maybe she never slept. But she was getting side-tracked—her voice cold, dry, her eyes full of a kind of dull, searing loss. Her fingers twisted arthritically and angrily in her lap.

“Go on,” Joan said, her jaw feeling heavy; her limbs feeling heavy. There was a stone sinking in her chest.

“It was the middle of the night. Two in the morning. Three. I don’t know.” Mme Cammaerts had been asleep in her adjoining bedroom, and suddenly the covers had been ripped from her; Sherlock’s hands had been on her shoulders. But she called her Victoire all the way through and it only made it worse, this disconnect: Joan wanted to tell her, wanted to say, _her name is Sherlock, she’s French-Norwegian, born in Surrey; she’s a genius, she’s a madwoman, she’s my friend, she’s my lover_.

“She was shaking me,” Mme Cammaerts continued, raising her hands and making a juddering motion—staring at somewhere other than Joan. “Shaking me, telling me—get up, get up.” And Mme Cammaerts got up, and Sherlock dragged her up the stairs, but not before making her bed, as if no one had been sleeping there. So Joan heard. There had been battering at the door. Shouting.

In the top room, Sherlock had pulled up the floorboards with grasping fingers as below, there was a great splintering, a crash. German voices raised in shouts. Sherlock had pushed Mme Cammaerts into the crawl space, said, “Be quiet,” and boarded her in.

“Like being buried,” Mme Cammaerts spat, and Joan saw her blink hard a few time, her white lips twisting and trembling. “Stupid girl. Oh, that stupid girl.”

“Keep going.”

“She—they—I heard them.”

“Did they know she was British?”

Mme Cammaerts didn’t respond for a long few seconds, then shook her head; a twitching, minimal movement, as she stared dimly forwards. Joan’s knees nearly gave out and she said, “Good,” reached blindly for a chair, leaned hard on the back of it. “Good.”

“They said she was Resistance.”

“Yes. What else.”

“I heard—noises. You know. Thuds. Someone—hit her, I think.”

There was a cold hand gripping Joan’s windpipe. She nodded as if this were perfectly routine, and said, “Did she fight back?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“But I heard her—” Mme Cammaerts’ voice raised a little, cracking; a goose’s shriek. She breathed deep, pressed her lips angrily together, and marshalled herself. “I. I heard her fall. Right on top of me. The thud—and then.”

“Then,” Joan said, slow, careful, “they took her away.”

Mme Cammaerts raised her eyes to Joan’s finally. “No,” she said. “Not just then. Afterwards, yes. First she started praying—stupid, stupid girl—”

Joan stared hard at Mme Cammarts. “Praying?”

“What good was the Vatican going to do her, I—”

“No, stop, tell me—what did she say, exactly?”

“She—I don’t know. Her voice was—she had blood in her mouth.”

“Tell me what it sounded like.”

“Vatican, Vatican something.”

“Des camées du Vatican?”

“Yes. Yes, it could have been.”

“Okay,” said Joan, “okay.”

Silence settled over them like ash. Slowly, Joan pushed herself up into a straighter standing position; slowly, she moved towards the stove. Everything slowly. She felt like her limbs might creak. Her lungs, incredibly, were still filling and emptying, as unstoppable as the tide. Life was curiously inexstinguishable. Maybe that would hold true for Sherlock as well.

Joan lit the stove and started boiling some chestnuts. Half way through, Mme Cammaerts staggered to her feet and muttered, “Little fool, I’ll do it,” in a voice more like her own. Joan nodded; she knew enough not to tell her to take care of herself.

Des camées du Vatican. Joan said, “I’m going to get some things from her room. I’m probably not going to come back here. You should try and stay with a friend. Have you got—I don’t know. Relatives? In the country, maybe.”

There was a clang as Mme Cammaerts dropped her spoon against the rim of the pot, and rounded on Joan with a white fury. “Little girl,” she said, “I have lived here for decades now. Do you think you, or the Germans, or anybody, can make me move?” With sudden violence, she spat onto the floor at Joan’s feet. Her hands were trembling.

Joan stared at her, aghast and knowing her face was just as pale, just as haggard. “Fine,” she said, and heard her voice muted and stifled. “Okay. Fine.” Then she turned, opened the door, and climbed to the attic room.

It looked burst at the seams. Joan was almost impressed, in a sick kind of way. She hadn’t thought there was enough in it to create a mess. The desk was overturned. The patchwork quilt was half on the bed, half picking up dust on the floor. Mme Cammaerts hadn’t put the floorboards back when she had climbed back up, after the Germans had dragged Sherlock off. Some of the papers which had been attached to their undersides had come off in the process of hiding her away, and they rested gently around the room like fallen feathers done floating. In the crawl space was Sherlock’s shabby leather case, the one which contained her W/T set, and a horribly insecure amount of paper.

The whole room seemed still; the whole scene seemed final.

Joan collected the papers and burnt them all in the grate, her hands not trembling on the matches. She watched the fire claim them. She picked up the case, opened it; the radio was still there. Good. The weight had told her as much, but it was good to check these things. She kept it and replaced the boards. On a sheet of plain paper she wrote a message to Sally.

> KNIGHT TAKEN IN. HAS ESCAPE PLANS.  
>  IF NO FURTHER NEWS BY MON CONTACT LONDON. BE CAREFUL.

She encoded it, burnt the original, and slipped the coded version into her needlework bag. Then she allowed herself one moment with her hand over her face. Then she walked down the stairs, down the stairs again, and out of the door.

Des camées du Vatican. Vatican cameos. _Meet me in in the Rue de la Pompe, number fourteen, fourteen minutes past eight in the evening of the next Saturday._ It was Saturday today. 

“You better have a plan,” Joan muttered, meaning, _you had better be alright_. She started to walk towards Sally’s dead drop location. She had five hours to fill up.

* * *

The Rue de la Pompe was empty, narrow, lined with tall, pointed houses whose roofs shone a coppery green-black in the orange streetlights. It had been raining, and Joan’s boots splashed through greasy puddles. By her sides, her right hand flexed and unflexed. In her left was Sherlock’s W/T set. Slung over her shoulder, her needlework bag.

She raised her hand to knock at the door of number fourteen, then paused, and instead just pushed the door open. Inside the hall was dusty, empty. She locked the door behind her, and eased her gun from her bag, moving softly from room to room. Dark. Shadows. Dust. Sheet-muffled furniture. Breath-stopped silence.

_Sherlock. Sherlock, be alright. Damn you, be alright. We had plans._

Her pistol’s grip rough against her palm, Joan breathed in and looked towards the stairs, and slowly began to mount them. At the landing, she peered through the gloom by the slippery orange light coming through the windows, and saw nothing. Two more doors. She tried the first.

Sherlock stood silhouetted by the window, like she had stood when Joan had discovered her in the top room on the Rue Ghislaine. The room was dark. Joan thought she said, “Oh God,” but she didn’t hear herself. In fact for two seconds she saw nothing, heard nothing; then she was back, gripping the doorframe, with Sherlock’s hands on her shoulders, cupping her face: “—fine, Joan, I’m perfectly—”

Joan shoved her away, and said, “Oh God, oh Jesus, oh for God’s sake—” she _had_ been pushing her away, she was sure, but now she was clutching at the front of Sherlock’s coat. Her whole frame was shaking. By the streetlamp light, she could see that Sherlock had a bruise on her jaw, and a crust of blood rimming her left nostril. Sherlock’s hands were on Joan’s upper arms. Their foreheads knocked together; came to rest against each other.

“Oh God,” Joan said again.

Sherlock gave a shuddering nod of the head.

“Oh God. Are you okay? What happened?”

“Fine. I’m fine.” Sherlock’s eyes were closed, her eyelashes dark, fluttering semi-circles on her pallid cheeks. She kept licking her lips. Joan raised a hand, smoothed inky curls back from her cheek. “I’m fine. Don’t—”

“Don’t take me for a sap, I’m just checking you’re real,” Joan all but growled, and Sherlock gave a gasping snort of laughter, her fingers digging harder into Joan’s arms for a moment. Joan rubbed her thumb across Sherlock’s cheekbone once, hard, then dropped her hand to her shoulder. “Jesus. Go on. What happened?”

“Nothing,” Sherlock said, opening her eyes. “I stuck to my cover. Victoire Renaud. They let me go.”

Joan looked at her then; really looked at her.

Later she would be asked _didn’t you find it suspicious_. And she would answer _no_ and she would mean it. Sherlock stood there in the half-light, battered and wearily shining like the moon caught in a net, warm and solid under Joan’s hands, and said, “They let me go,” and Joan believed her, because she had to believe that sometimes, good luck just happened. There were shining moments in the world: there were lucky, gasping, one-in-a-million chances. Things went right, sometimes. And Sherlock was there, breathing, aching, bruised, bloody-nosed, free.

Joan said, “Oh, God,” and sagged forwards so that her face was buried in the crook of Sherlock’s shoulder and Sherlock’s cheek was tucked against her hair. Her arms she locked tight about Sherlock’s neck. She was standing on one of Sherlock’s toes, having stumbled closer. Sherlock didn’t pull away; just wound her arms tighter about Joan.

Slowly, Joan leaned out. Sherlock relaxed her hold but didn’t let go. They looked at each other, only a few inches of light and shadow and dust between them.

“You’re not blown?” Joan asked, just one last time, to make sure. She didn’t like how long Sherlock took licking her lips and looking into Joan’s eyes before she answered, but when she answered she said, “No, I’m not,” and Joan sagged a little in relief.

“They thought you were Resistance?”

“Yes.” Sherlock’s brows flickered tiredly, her voice getting weary and grim as she added, “They still do, but they let me go in the hope of reeling me in later with a bigger catch.”

“They told you that?”

“Obviously not.”

“Jesus.”

“Quite.”

And so they were as good as found out, Joan thought, numb in Sherlock’s arms. The game was up. Suddenly she felt mournful, bereaved. But she blinked up into Sherlock’s huge silvery eyes, and realised, with amazement, that there was a tired, bright smile trembling on Sherlock’s lips.

Joan frowned and, unwittingly, smiled back in a rather bewildered, automatic way, though she was thinking, still, over and over: _as good as found out_.

Sherlock said, “Joan?”

“Yes?”

“Care to help me with some sabotage?”

Joan was still adrift; confused, relieved, and with a kind of crushing, speechless sense of loss lying open in her chest. “What?”

“It’s just there’s a bathtub in the next room.” Sherlock’s fingers flexed at Joan’s waist. “I propose we fill it full enough to cripple even the most efficiently Aryan of warmachines—”

Again, suddenly, Joan had that feeling of a release of pressure somewhere inside her ribcage, and this time she gasped with it, grabbing tight at Sherlock: laughing. Both of them. They were howling with mirth, impossibly, foreheads together and chests hurting from lack of air. Real, searing pain choking Joan as she gripped Sherlock tight and said, just about, “Yes—yes. Good idea.”

So they stumbled to the next room, where Sherlock closed the shutters and turned on the lights, and Joan ran the bath, and Sherlock turned off the cold tap because, she said, Joan was running it too cold, and Joan turned it back on because, she said, boiling was for potatoes, and Sherlock turned it off again because, “You haven’t had the day I’ve had.”

Her fingers on Sherlock’s on the tap, Joan said, “I’ve had a pretty bad day,” but didn’t push it. She wasn’t bruised, after all. She moved her hand away from Sherlock’s hand and put it instead on her face; leaned up, kissed her. She tasted coppery and warm. Blood. Joan didn’t bother mentioning it, and instead just reached for the buttons of Sherlock’s blouse.

Beneath her clothes, Sherlock’s body was a patchwork of mottled bruises, but she had few more serious injuries. Joan’s jaw tightened but she refused to make a fuss. “You’re fine after all,” she said. 

“That’s what I said.”

“I try not to listen to you too much.”

Sherlock slipped into the tub with a quiet groan, and Joan dropped her needlework bag before undressing. She had left the W/T set in the other room. It didn’t seem like something to mix with steam and water. 

When she was naked, she slipped into the bath, her back to Sherlock’s chest and her head lolling back for a moment onto Sherlock’s shoulder.

So the game was up, then. They would have to go back to Britain. It was inevitable. They were as good as blown; the challenge now was to get a message to London requesting their flights back, and to survive until they could be taken home. And Joan felt cheated, but glad; angry enough to weep, but glad.

She had promised herself she wouldn’t do this, but she closed her eyes and pretended they were in London anyway. She pretended that outside the door was Paddington, and they could take the Tube to Harry’s house, well, Clarence’s house, and go for tea there. Joan could mention his drinking and Harry could get angry and both of them could get embarrassed, while Sherlock and Clarence traded cool looks, and after they left—Joan feeling uncomfortable and ashamed of herself—Sherlock would talk about her sister. Joan would suggest they eat in a British Restaurant; Sherlock would snort. They would go to a pub and eat there. They would drink together. Maybe there were still clubs in London where women like them could go dancing. If there weren’t, so what? They could go walking in the blackout. 

With Sherlock’s body pressed tight against Joan’s back—one of Sherlock’s knees raised either side of her—and with her eyes closed, it was almost as if they weren’t in Paris; as if Sherlock hadn’t just escaped internment in some German hellhole.

In her ear, Sherlock murmured, “I’m,” then stopped. Joan said, “What,” not opening her eyes. In a puff of warm air against Joan’s throat, Sherlock muttered, “I don’t know.”

Finally Joan opened her eyes, twisted around a little, and kissed Sherlock clumsily on the mouth. “I’m glad we met,” she said, “in stupid circumstances or otherwise.”

The room filled with steam and they leaned against each other. Sherlock’s thumb moved at Joan’s hipbone; her breath moved in and out like the tide, washing against Joan’s throat and ear. Joan reached around and stroked the damp, soft curls at the back of Sherlock’s neck.

“I’m,” Sherlock said again, and this time Joan bother prompting her: the word sorry hung in the air despite them both.

“It’s okay,” Joan said. After a moment, thinking of sending messages to Baker Street, and the logistics of their removal back to England, she said, “What are we going to do?”

Sherlock shifted a little, creating tiny waves which lapped at both their bodies. Joan looked down at them; at her own body, at Sherlock’s bruised legs, at how Sherlock’s left foot was tucked tight against Joan’s ankle. The water made their skin greenish. Sherlock’s bruises looked lurid blue.

“First,” Sherlock said, “you’re going to decode the message in your bag.”

“How did you—” That made Joan laugh, in this of all places; a bit shortly, but genuinely. “Never mind.”

With her bizarre, exhausted smile still hanging onto the corners of her weary mouth, Joan gave a groan of effort as she reached over the side of the bathtub, water slopping onto the floor and her skin squeaking against enamel. Sherlock’s hand stayed on her hip as if she were trying to steady her. Or perhaps she was just reluctant to quite let her go. Joan snagged the message and a pencil from the depths of her bag and sank back with an ungainly splash, holding the paper aloft to save it. “Right,” she said. “Here we go.”

“Want help?”

“No, thanks.”

Sherlock hm’ed, almost chuckled, and leaned back, closing her eyes. Joan smiled at her, and twisted so that she could put the paper against the wall. Her fingers left damp smudges. She drew her transposition key in a neat little grid and filled it in. Sherlock was stroking up and down her spine with her eyes still closed, feeling out each vertebrae. Joan shifted, smiled, and almost said stop that, but looked over at her and saw how Sherlock’s purpled jaw was swelling. She licked her lips, looked away, and got to work.

It was easy, for some reason, perhaps because she couldn’t concentrate on it. The mechanical work of referring to the key, then the message, then the key, took up the bulk of her exhausted brain power. She floating between the hard facts and the pencil marks, wrote down words without thinking about them.

The lead snapped on the words _green door_.

“Oh,” she said.

Sherlock, eyes shut, said, “Mn?”

Joan licked her lips, shook her head though Sherlock couldn’t see, and carried on decoding with, now a slight shake in her left hand, and a bluntened pencil.

“Shit,” she said, when it was done, her voice full of shock and hope and that strange aching loss which had started up in her head like a tune she couldn’t place at the first realisation that they would have to leave France.

“What?” Sherlock had opened her eyes and, for God’s sake, Joan thought irrelevantly, staring at her: her irises looked almost lilac-grey now. Bright, light, pale.

“We’ve got flights home,” Joan said, and Sherlock surged forwards, grabbed the paper from her with wet hands. “Sherlock!”

“Home?”

The message read:

> SUGGEST RENDEZ-VOUS AT GREEN DOOR  
>  PICK UP NARRATOR AT A22 FIVE DAYS AND KNIGHT AT A13 FOUR DAYS  
>  MIDNIGHT BOTH

Sherlock looked from it to Joan, then back again. Then she threw it onto the floor and stood up in a chaos of splashing water and windmilling limbs, scrambling over the side, muttering, “Damn them, damn—”

“Weren’t you expecting this?”

Sherlock turned and stared at her, breathless, naked. Joan could see goosebumps prickling over her arms, her breasts, her stomach. She had frozen mid-gesture, one hand half-raised before her. “Expecting it?” she said.

“You said,” Joan said, slowly, “you said the Germans were waiting to pull you in again.”

“Oh, damn the Germans, it wasn’t the Germans who killed Corentin—”

No. She had come too far for this. Horrified anger cut straight to Joan’s core. “It could be them that kill you, Sherlock,” she said, her voice hard, gripping the side of the bath. “It nearly was. Jesus!”

“You can go. Of course you can go. You should go.”

“ _Sherlock_ ,” Joan said suddenly, getting to her feet, climbing out over the side of the tub. Sherlock opened her mouth. “No. Shut up. Either both of us go or both of us stay.”

Sherlock, dripping wet and with her hands in her hair, stared at her. The water had made her bruises more vivid. Some patches of her skin were purple as the sky before a storm. “No,” she said. “I have work to do here.”

“Then so do I,” Joan said.

Sherlock licked her lips. “Please?” she said, trying on the word with visible confusion, eyebrows drawn down and together across her brow. Her throat was working and Joan should have realised that that was strange.

“Don’t you say _please_ to me,” Joan said, “don’t you act like this is about good bloody manners.” Sherlock’s jaw was clenching, unclenching, and Joan should have realised that was strange. “I’m staying with—”

“You’re blown.”

“What?”

“You’re _blown_ ,” Sherlock spat. “The Germans know you’re a British agent.”

Moving slowly, Joan walked to her. The air was cold on her skin, raising goosebumps. Sherlock wasn’t looking at her. “What?” she said again.

“It wasn’t me,” Sherlock said, and Joan _grabbed_ her. Not hard. Just enough to make her blink and stare at Joan with those pale, fringed eyes, her lips parted incredulously.

“You think I’d think it was you?” Joan demanded. “Really?”

“I think you’d have the common sense to entertain the notion—”

“Jesus!”

“They asked me about you. In the Rue Ghislaine. Where’s _Angeline Mercier_.” Sherlock bared her teeth, pushing Joan’s hands away, pushing her fingers through her hair. Her face was taut, a feral light in her bright, bright eyes. Joan’s breath was catching. Sherlock wasn’t stopping.

“That’s why I said _Vatican cameos_. So that if you came looking for me, you’d at least be here for a night. I thought you’d take the radio, too.”

“Sherlock—”

“I was buying you time to work it out. To run. I didn’t exactly think they were going to _let me go_.”

“Sherlock, shut up, shut—”

“You can’t stay in France.”

“Then you’re leaving with me.” 

Joan realised that her hands were on Sherlock’s wrists and that Sherlock was trembling. Her clammy, wide-eyed face looked as it had done that day in London when Mycroft had telephoned her and she had pushed over the wardrobe and pulled at her own hair in a fit of breathtaking fury. Joan could feel her pulse vibrating under her hands. “Sherlock,” she said. “You’re leaving with me.”

“We’ve got different pick-up points,” Sherlock mumbled. “The case—”

“Do you think I care about the case?”

“ _I_ care about the case!”

“You can shout at me as much as you want,” Joan said through gritted teeth, holding her wrists tighter. “You can’t scare me off.”

Sherlock looked at her like Joan had slapped her—not hurt, but shocked, blinking. Joan said, “It doesn’t have to be the last time. We can come back. People do multiple flights. You can get more information in London. Put it all to Harding. See what he thinks. And come back. You don’t have to choose between me and the case, that’s not what this is. This is an operational decision. Okay?”

Sherlock continued to look amazed, and then—unbelievably—gave a kind of quiet laugh. 

“What?” Joan asked.

“An operational decision to stay together,” Sherlock said. Her voice was stilted—unsteady and unsure.

Slowly, a tremulous smile spread across Joan’s face. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, us in a nutshell, isn’t it?” And she let go, very gradually, of Sherlock’s wrists. Looked around. There were no towels, so she picked up her discarded clothing instead, and Sherlock said, “Oh, put that down.” Her voice sounded shaken, exhausted, greyed-out.

Joan glanced up at her. “I’m freezing,” she said.

Sherlock said, “There’s a bed in the next room,” and there was a quiet, quiet question in the words.

Joan nodded slowly.

They crossed back to the room Joan had found Sherlock in. The shock over, she could look around properly. The bed was narrow, grey-sheeted, and was, alongside a low table and three mismatched chairs, one of the few pieces of furniture in the room. Joan thought: a double bed. If we do that thing we thought of. London. Living in London. We’ll have a double bed. By the time she was done thinking it, she was on her back. Sherlock dragged the sheets over them and her hands found Joan’s body and Joan grabbed her tight.

“Jesus,” she mumbled into Sherlock’s shoulder. “Are we going home, then?”

“Temporarily. I’ll transmit the news to London tomorrow. When we’re about to leave. No need to make this place a target too quickly.”

“Christ. Have we done anything over here?”

“You blew up a train.”

“I did. I did. Not just one.”

“Not just one.”

“I shot someone too.”

“You mentioned.”

“You’re really not worried about that, are you.”

“Neither are you.”

“No. S’pose not. Christ, it’s cold.”

“I’m trying to help,” said Sherlock, and Joan said, “I know, I know you are.”

There, locked together under the sheets, shivering, Joan thought: love you, in love with you, but didn’t say it aloud. She just pressed her mouth to Sherlock’s shoulder. Sherlock groaned and Joan realised she was kissing a bruise, started to apologise; Sherlock said, “No, it’s. No. It’s good.” Joan clutched her tighter, bit her where she had been—what? Hit? Shoved? Joan didn’t know. Unlike Sherlock, she couldn’t trace the patterns of bruises; couldn’t read the past in its present symptoms, the blossom of broken blood vessels all across the surface of Sherlock’s skin. They were, to her, a terrifying chaos. So she pushed her hands along Sherlock’s sides and kept kissing, mouthing at her shoulder.

“I,” Sherlock said, “I, oh. Oh God. You said my name.”

“Yes,” Joan muttered.

“I suppose—I can’t—I didn’t expect to miss it. You saying my name.”

“Yeah,” Joan said, “yeah, I. You too. I missed you saying my name too.”

“Joan.”

Warm hands. The scrape of hair on skin. Huffed hot breath. And Sherlock saying Joan’s name. The moonlight and the streetlamps mingled to make the air tense with pale tangerine brightness, washing out all colour; what shade Sherlock’s eyes were was briefly a mystery. Joan couldn’t bring herself to care about that either. Sherlock gave a choked whimper, her breath gurgling in her throat. Joan’s thigh was clamped between her legs. Sherlock moved like discordant music, starting and stopping and shuddering. Joan pushed her hand down until her fingers found the patch of curls which framed Sherlock’s cunt, and pushed, and pushed, and stroked, and said, “I,” loved someone once and could do it again, “I,” don’t want you to die, “I,” don’t want to die myself, “I,” and Sherlock was coming, was moaning into the pillow and clutching at Joan’s hair, saying, “You, oh, you, yes—”

* * *

Sherlock woke with a start, saw the ceiling and thought yes before she could understand why the sight of sunlight had filled her with a kind of defiance. Yes—as if to say, yes, today is coming; no, I won’t turn away from it.

There was no tea to make, no breakfast to eat and nothing to pack; there was nothing to do in the whole house but bathe and sleep, and so they took another bath together, moving slowly and rhythmically together in the water, Sherlock’s teeth in Joan’s collarbone for the duration. Splashes. Gasps. Steam floating between and around them.

Afterwards, they dressed. Sherlock buttoned up her blouse slowly, concentrating on mechanical action. Yes. “A22 is in Picardy,” Joan murmured to herself. “A13...that’s a little south, yeah?”

“Yes,” Sherlock murmured, drifting forwards to push Joan’s wet hair out of her eyes and fix her collar. Joan blinked at her, surprised, and Sherlock frowned, supposing she must be doing something strange. She dropped her hands, and moved to set up her radio set.

“You should go,” she said. “Before I start transmitting. It’s risky.”

“That’s why I’m staying,” said Joan, picking up her gun.

Sherlock smiled at her when she looked away, and turned back to her radio. Took a deep breath. Came on air.

Thirty clicking, beeping, tense minutes later, the message had been sent; London had been officially notified of their acceptance of the offered flights home. 

Joan said, “We should leave separately.”

“Of course,” said Sherlock, disconnecting and standing up, circling her wrist to work out the stiffness. “Only sensible.”

“I’ll see you,” said Joan, smiling. She was bath-flushed, droplets of water still glinting on her drying hair. Her skin looked rough, warm. Sherlock was blinking rapidly.

“Enjoy yourself,” she said, because it had worked before. The words echoed painfully but Joan kept smiling.

“Always,” she replied. “You too.”

“Of course,” said Sherlock.

Joan leaned in, kissed her—breathless, quick, too easy, and Sherlock was still distracted, startled by the kiss when it finished, so she didn’t quite get to respond. But to say ‘no, do that again’ would be utterly pointless. She gave herself a moment with her eyes closed, feeling cold air on her lips where Joan had moved away, and then straightened up, levelling her gaze at Joan.

“Five days,” said Joan.

“Yes,” said Sherlock. “Just five days.” And smiled.

They looked at each other for a moment, but there was no point in lingering. They were going to see each other in five days. The door shut. Sherlock heard the creak of the stairs as Joan descended them. And then the front door swung open and closed.

Sherlock stood absolutely still in the empty room for a few long moments.

The message she had sent was:

> ACCEPT BOTH OFFERS SEE YOU AT GREEN DOOR HAVE IMPORTANT INFORMATION TO SUPPLY ABOUT MORIARTY THAT’S ALL FOR NOW

She supposed that London would be confused when she failed to show up, but the message wasn’t for them.

Thirty minutes was easily long enough for a German D/F van to pick her signal up and locate her, she reflected, watching dust dance in the shafts of morning light coming through the window. And Moriarty would be watching all her transmissions. Decoding them too, no doubt. And so really it was just a waiting game.

Was it dangerous to repeat Corentin’s move—to send Joan away, knowing Moriarty was following every message sent back to London? Probably, yes; but Sherlock doubted Moriarty would replicate the steps of the last dance exactly. And in any case this was between Moriarty and Sherlock, and should be settled as such. And in any case Edith Whistler had survived.

The window didn’t look onto the street in front of the door. Sherlock couldn’t watch Joan leave. It was just as well. She watched dust move in the light for an hour, for a year, for a moment. Below, the front door opened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wonder what joys the next chapter could bring. mO_Om Also, I feel I may be disappointing lovers of historical footnotes; this is the part which borrows more from canon than from history, so there's not really much to give further info on.
> 
> Also, I'm really sorry that I couldn't get this one to you on time! The next chapter will be here on Monday 10th February.


	23. Moriarty.

“Yes,” Sherlock murmured in English, with a cursory glance towards the door, “yes, I thought it would be you.”

“You weren’t sure?” asked Moriarty.

Sherlock paused for a moment before responding, thinking it over. “Not until yesterday,” she said, quite honestly.

“Oh?”

“Gestapo headquarters. Remarkably conducive to thought.” Sherlock shrugged. “I suppose I have you to thank for that.”

“Well. I got you out, too.”

“Goes without saying. I assume Professor’s dead?”

Moriarty—Navigator, Georgette, whoever—smiled.

She had very small white teeth, and in the dusty half-light she looked more impish than ever. All her clothes were black, as if she were recently bereaved. Her step was light as she walked across the room; her skirt bounced against her calves. She walked right to the window, and opened up the shutters with calm, peremptory movements, filling the room with outdoor light. Sherlock was strangely aware of the bed in the corner of the room, the sheets still rumpled. The sweetsharp tang of sweat laced the air still. Though she knew her own sense of smell was unusually precise, she had absolutely no doubt that Moriarty could detect what she detected. Ugly, to think of Moriarty walking over the same floorboards Joan had stood her ground upon.

“Yes,” Moriarty said, dusting off her hands. She spoke English with a gentle Irish accent. “Yes, for quite a while.” She pointed to the chair opposite Sherlock. “Mind if I…?”

Sherlock spread her hands. “Be my guest,” she said, very softly.

Moriarty sat, and placed her hands on the table which separated them. Her fingers were tiny, but perfectly formed. “No one else _gets_ it,” she said, whining like a child. Sherlock shrugged.

“It’s not that clever,” she said. “Moriarty. Derived from Ó Muircheartaigh. Navigator.”

For some reason the connection had exploded in her mind with a burst of pain, as a Gestapo officer’s fist connected with her jaw and she felt the world crack, go bright, go black: oh, she had thought, totally irrelevantly, oh I know who it is.

Moriarty was talking again, drawing Sherlock along with her; “I just like it when things have _meaning_ , you know,” she was drawling, pushing her fingertips against the table top for a few moments before she took her hands away and put them in her lap. Sherlock caught every single movement: chopped it up, replayed it, analysed it. Suddenly she realised that every time she blinked, Moriarty copied her.

Her right hand twitched. Moriarty smiled.

“So,” Sherlock said.

“So,” Moriarty replied, sing-song.

“Tell me about Corentin.”

“ _Tell_ you?”

Sherlock looked at her steadily. It wasn’t Georgette; Moriarty looked nothing like Georgette. It was curious, how her face twisted when she was being herself. There was something clammy and mushroom-like about the pallor of her cheeks now. She looked like she grew in dark places. “You want to,” Sherlock said.

“And how do you know that?”

“I’d want to.”

“Oh.” Moriarty’s lips stretched wide. “And we’re similar?”

“Yes. Obviously.”

“So why don’t you tell me your theory, my _dear_.”

Sherlock watched her for a few moments. The whites of her eyes were too pale, somehow; her smile didn’t seem quite attached to her face. Sherlock raised her hands very briefly to her mouth and breathed in through her nose; she said, finally, “Alright.”

Moriarty raised her eyebrows expectantly and just kept smiling.

Sherlock dropped her hands. “January,” she said. “The network was still stationed in Picardy. Corentin, cover name Anton Durant, real name Robert Walthamstow, had gotten a little bit too close to you.” A sniff. “That and I suppose he was too strong-willed. Too _good_. The thing about Professor network is that it’s made up of people who are remarkably lacking in any kind of talent for espionage. Which is what allowed you to get away with puppeteering the whole mess.”

Moriarty pursed her lips, gave a slow, expansive shrug: _it’s not my job to judge_ , her face said. Sherlock waited for her to say something. When she didn’t, Sherlock took a breath and continued.

“Fortunately, Corentin had a bit of a weak spot.” She kept her eyes trained firmly on Moriarty. “A wireless operator. Young. Female.” She had realised that she didn’t want to use Edith Whistler’s real name, not to Moriarty, not when Edith was still alive. “He accidentally sent her off to die; you alerted him to his mistake and offered him a way to save her life—by blowing himself up along with a train, and stopping her in her tracks—but.”

Moriarty tilted her head.

“Here,” Sherlock said, “is what I don’t quite understand, because really, you could have killed him at any moment. You tipped off the Gestapo to trap—his wireless operator sweetheart.”

“Edie?” Moriarty offered, voice piping and mocking and sweet. “Edith Whistler?”

“Yes,” Sherlock said after a cool, glassy pause. “Thank you. No memory for names. You tipped off the Gestapo to trap Edith Whistler; why not use them to kill off Corentin, if he was being so troublesome?”

Settled back in her chair, mute once more, Moriarty smiled like a dazed oracle. Sherlock watched her and tried not to feel strangling anger rise up within her; that was too much what she wanted. “Alright,” she said evenly. “Because you wanted the train destroyed any—”

“Cold.”

Sherlock’s throat clicked. “Fine,” she said. “Because you wanted the death to be difficult for London to be sure of.”

“ _Warmer_ ,” Moriarty said, and Sherlock nodded slowly, feeling herself on firmer ground.

“Yes,” she said. “Because you needed to put in those rescue requests in his name, in his code. Why?”

“Come now. Come now.” Moriarty’s stare was hardening, her lip hitching in a sneer which threw off the equilibrium of her face. When she spoke again there was a bitter kind of anger in her voice. “Do I have to give you all the answers, Miss _Renaud_?”

Slowly, Sherlock wet her lips. “Obviously not,” she said, feeling her voice rasp in her throat and wondering if she was frightened, or just fascinated. She couldn’t quite tell. “The flights themselves.”

“Finally!” Moriarty cried, and Sherlock’s eyes snapped shut for a split second in a blink. In the seconds after Moriarty’s outburst, the dust settled, and Sherlock unstuck her tongue from the roof of her mouth, which was suddenly arid and scratchy.

“So you wanted,” she said, “you needed supplies—no, no, it wasn’t that. You’ve got resources. You don’t have to trick your way into getting what you need when you can request it—from either side.”

“Yes. But think about it, darling,” Moriarty said, leaning on the R, _dar_ -ling, “the flights themselves.”

“Why do you want me to know?” Sherlock snapped suddenly, and Moriarty raised her eyebrows.

“Wouldn’t you?” she asked, and Sherlock had to close her mouth and admit, with a slight, understanding nod, that yes: she would.

How long would it take Joan to get out of Paris, she wondered? Not that she would be totally safe after leaving the city—just at slightly less risk. Slightly further away from Moriarty. Who had the Gestapo, it seemed, under her—oh. “Oh.”

“Finally,” Moriarty muttered again, sinking back and sounding exasperated.

“The flights themselves,” Sherlock said. “A show.”

“A show?” Moriarty said, showing her teeth. “I’d call it spycraft.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Sherlock said, with slow shock; spycraft on an absurd level. “But showmanship all the same. Showing off.”

“What else was I supposed to do? I am a show-off.”

“You were demonstrating to the Germans that you could not just predict the landings of British planes, but control them.”

“Yes.”

“But.”

“But.”

“Again, it’s too complex, it’s—”

“Would you have come for less?” Moriarty inquired, smiling her disconnected smile.

In the bright yellow space between them, dust spiralled, puffed by their breath. On the table, their hands remained stationary. Sherlock opened her mouth slowly. “I’m sorry,” she said, with a quiet, disgusted restraint.

“No you’re not.”

Sherlock shook her head, waved her hand like she was trying to bat away a fly, not a flippant remark, her breath hitching and her mind rattling through images like colour photographs. Those eyes those hands those fingernails _no_ ; she didn’t recognise Moriarty. She didn’t know Moriarty. What did she mean, _would you have come for less?_ Was this—

“Do you think we’ve _met_? We haven’t met.”

—her fault _again_ —

“Oh, no. You’d remember that, wouldn’t you? No,” and here Moriarty sighed, puffing out her cheeks and shrugging, stretching out her tiny fingers, as Sherlock’s heart began to gallop, her throat constricting with a horror she couldn’t full understand, “no, but I know you, Sherlock. I know you very, very well.”

Sherlock said, “ _How_.”

“Let me tell you a story,” said Moriarty, in what was almost a croon, leaning back slowly and keeping her hands flat on the table. Her eyes were wide and mad. Sherlock saw it now: mad. She stared back into those mad eyes with her lips parted and her own gaze freezing. “It starts, like a whole lot of fuss, in 1939.”

Joan would be on the train by now, Sherlock decided, watching the quiver of Moriarty’s throat as she spoke; how her lower lip trembled, how her face was claylike, masklike, a fascimile. “Say there’s this _girl_. We’ll call her Miss Shoames. Miss Shoames spends a bit of time playing the fiddle in Paris but it turns out she’s not to be trusted all alone in a strange country. When she goes back, her family pulls strings and gets her into Girton. But then that goes wrong, too. There’s a _pattern_ here. So we start this story when she’s just after getting kicked out of Cambridge, and when she toddles back to her family estate in Surrey to bemoan her miserable lot in life amongst some charming scenery in the best tradition of would-be debs who can’t get their lives together.”

 _America_. The thought came glancing like a burst of reflected white light, splintering Sherlock’s concentration. _There’s something American about her accent, too. She’s spent time in Boston. I wonder why._ She was intently conscious of her own trembling breathing. 

“While she’s there,” Moriarty was continuing, “rattling about that big old house like something come loose in the engine of a Rolls, she goes walking. And walking. And walking. Until one day Miss Shoames finds something,” here Moriarty took a long, wet breath, licked her lips, looked hungry, _amazing_. Guess what it was.”

“A body,” Sherlock intoned, seeing it before her: the bloated white limbs caught in algae. The tendrils of floating hair. The dirt in the crevices of the carcass. “Floating in a pond.”

“ _Yes_. Young Carl Powers, but—”

“But without his shoes. His killer, a woman, took them, put them on, and wore them back.” Sherlock’s voice was distant, monotonous, reciting memories which had long since calcified into part of her. Scraping them out and displaying them was painful. She took a slow breath, and made her first readjustment. “Or the killer made—a woman wear them back.”

Moriarty smiled. “Something like that,” she admitted, in a modest manner, as if knocking a little dust from her lapel.

“But Miss Shoames was just a little bit too ambitious,” she carried on. Sherlock felt like her own lungs were crushing the breath out of her. She didn’t move. Moriarty carried on. “Thing was, she made such a hullaballoo trying to get the police to chase up Powers’ shoes that when they did find them, hidden in a godforsaken hovel in the nearest village where an old, old, nasty sort of woman lived, well. That was that.”

That was that. Yes. It was playing out in front of Sherlock’s eyes. The knock on the door: “ _Well, Miss Holmes, it seems you may have been right after all_ …”

“No,” Sherlock had said, when the conclusion had been put in front of her. “No, that’s not right. What’s her motive?” Her head had been fuzzy from the previous night’s Nembutal. She had embarrassed the detectives by talking to them in her dressing gown, her bare feet grimy, her hair wild about her shoulders.

The taller of the men sighed, looked at her gently, and said, “Miss Holmes, that kind of person mightn’t necessarily have motives understandable to people like us. We do have to understand that Miss Harmack is a very confused woman, very—very illogical in many ways.”

“Mad. Oh for God’s sake, you don’t think it’s polite to say mad in front of me?” 

The man blushed and made some sheepish, polite noises in response. His shorter, rounder colleague only polished his glasses on the fat end of his tie and pursed his lips, and though Sherlock tried to appeal to him—“Surely you see this only raises more questions?”—he wouldn’t meet her eye.

Sherlock stared into Moriarty’s face. She knew her expression was one of blank horror. She tried to right it but it kept slipping.

“Poor old woman,” said Moriarty. “What was her name again?”

“Jane Harmack,” Sherlock said, barely moving her lips, staring with bright, sharp, unblinking fervour at Moriarty’s face.

“Mm,” Moriarty said meditatively. “And she was hanged for murder.”

The headline was MURDERESS HANGED. Mycroft had murmured, “I’m sorry,” and Sherlock had hurled her tea at the wall, pushed the pot off the table, then stalked from the breakfast room in a fit of breathless rage as Mycroft sat impassive and regal in the midst of all the petty destruction.

“Yes,” said Sherlock.

“Was that why you tried to kill yourself?”

That was just what Mycroft had asked, when they sat together on the damp floor of the bathroom, not touching, both staring forwards. _I don’t suppose that it’s just because of what went wrong with the Powers investigation?_

“No,” said Sherlock, then and now.

For a few moments, Moriarty smiled faintly, mistily, and Sherlock watched her. Neither spoke. Finally, with her huge, dark, cowishly wet eyes staringly, almost comically wide, Moriarty said, “Good. I was afraid for a while, you know. Of course I wanted you to do it, but I wanted you to do it for the right reasons. Not guilt, not remorse—”

“Frustration,” Sherlock said.

Frustration: waking up through the Nembutal at half five in the morning and stumbling out of bed, half in a dream. Walking outside in her dressing gown, to the woods, to the pool: Mycroft standing over her, saying, “Come in,” and Sherlock saying, “I’ve missed something.”

“You can’t find it now. Come in.”

Frustration: the silence of it all, the speechless sadness that pooled around the hills and settled dust-thick on the whole house. The grey light. The endless tea-times, breakfast-times, bed-times. Mycroft in their mother’s pearls, getting on well at the Foreign Ministry, looking less and less like Sherlock’s sister by the day.

Moriarty lowered her eyelashes at her, mouth crooked and fond.

“Frustration,” she repeated.

“Yes,” Sherlock said.

Moriarty grinned broadly and rakishly, then leaned back slowly, her shoulders hitting the back of the chair. “Paris. This must have started in Paris,” Sherlock said, trying to pin Moriarty down with facts. “I was hunting down cheating husbands and lost bracelets for cigarette money. I suppose you heard of me.”

Moriarty rolled her eyes, head lolling back for a moment. “Yes, yes. Your quaint little advertisements… _problems solved, questions answered_. You got people coming to hear their fortunes, didn’t you?” She cricked her neck, smiled lop-sidedly. “I know you did,” she said, and her voice was strangely intimate. “I sent one of them.”

In the dark behind Sherlock’s eyelids she saw the silly young girl with the dirty blonde hair frowning in the middle of Sherlock’s single room in Paris with the dirty bedsheets tumbling off the mattress and test-tubes glinting on the table, the cigarette ends smouldering in stained teacups and the smog of old smoke hanging heavily around the pale ceiling: “Oh, it’s not like any fortune teller’s parlour I’ve been to before…” And the two old women with their scrunched up frowns, wrinkles folding into wrinkles as Sherlock cursorily shredded their illusions. And the young man with his sweaty hands, stammering, “Does she, I mean, does she,” stretching his question out into an agony of repetitions and wiping his palms pointlessly against his trousers, “does she—”

And where had Moriarty been during all of that? Crouched in some similar room somewhere in Paris, staring with her glazed, wet eyes at the wall, smiling that detached smile—feeling some invisible, stretched-tight line between herself and Sherlock vibrate with a silvery chime?

Sherlock opened her eyes. Moriarty was looking at her and Sherlock realised with a vertiginous lurch that there was fascination in her eyes.

“I do,” Moriarty said, “understand you, you know. I’m almost glad you spoilt my hattrick. You deserve better. _Sherlock_.”

“It was you,” Sherlock said. “You got the records of my involvement with the Powers case to SOE.”

“I just arranged the facts.” Now Moriarty sounded whining, like she was pressing Sherlock to understand. Sherlock felt a pang through her jaw and realised that her teeth were clenched.

A life spent being moved from one place to another. A train-window life, a chess-piece life, a life which was arranged. “How much of it,” Sherlock said, “was _you_.”

“Oh, would you for once stop _kicking_ and _screaming_ because you haven’t got your _way_ ,” Moriarty spat, looking repulsed and a little pitying. “Because your big win turned out to be my work, yes, I made you. You’re mine. Get over it.”

Sherlock breathed out slowly. She was surprised that it didn’t crystallise in front of her, she felt so cold. Like her insides had frosted over, a chill white lattice over thick, struggling red.

Something had snagged at the back of her mind.

“I deserve,” she said slowly, repeating Moriarty’s words, “ _better_?”

The repulsion on Moriarty’s face dissipated immediately. Her shoulders lowered and her head tipped onto one side as if she were too thankful for Sherlock’s understanding, and exhausted from her efforts to make her understand, to hold herself upright. A smile spread across her face.

“We both do,” she sang. “And this is it. Our first and last meeting. I’m going to talk to you, finally, and you’re going to kill yourself. Finally.”

Sherlock blinked once and reality crashed in like light through a broken roof, took her breath away with its brightness, its clarity. The yellow shards of the afternoon light, the shadows on Moriarty’s face, every fleck of dust spiralling between them: it was clear, hard-edged, angular.

Sherlock said, “I doubt that.”

“They always do,” Moriarty agreed, not unkindly. “Tell me…”

“Yes?”

“Why did you send the lovely lieutenant away?”

Sherlock knew very well that this bright clarity was nothing but a helpful reaction of the brain. An evolutionary shudder, pushing her beyond fear in order to help her survive. It didn’t take away from how glad she was of it. Moriarty had just mentioned Joan. Very well. That was a fact to be dealt with; Sherlock slammed it into its place next to all the other facts and said, quite lightly, looking into Moriarty’s eyes, “Because she would have killed you in an instant.”

Moriarty laughed. “And you’re that fond of me?”

“No,” said Sherlock, leaning back, shrugging. “Just that—you’ve got a sniper stationed in the building opposite, with a clear shot through the window to me. If Joan had killed you, which she undoubtedly would have, he would have killed her. Or, sorry, perhaps it’s a woman. Seems hypocritical of me to assume. He or she would have killed her.”

“Oh,” said Moriarty, smiling, “you’re not so slow after all.”

“Thank you,” said Sherlock, thinking: _moveheralongmoveheralong_ and _breathe in one two good now out one two good in one two_ , her thoughts rattling to and fro like crazed clockwork. The edges of her clarity blurred then set in harder than ever. “You said you killed Powers and Harmack. Why?”

“Because it felt good,” was the reply, delivered with a lazy roll of deep brown eyes. Moriarty’s fingers drummed once on the table and Sherlock’s throat spasmed. She felt cold. It didn’t matter. “It would have felt better if you’d played along. Isn’t there something to tying a neat knot?”

“I prefer unravelling them,” said Sherlock. Her voice sounded rough but composed. “More satisfying.”

“Yes. Well. That’s where we’re different. In most other aspects…” Slowly, Moriarty nodded, keeping her smile hovering on her face, her gaze fixed on Sherlock.

“Oh, yes,” Sherlock murmured. “Though I think I’m a little more lucid.”

Moriarty laughed. “Don’t lie,” she said. “You know our problem isn’t that we’re crazy. We’re _much too sane_. Isn’t that why life’s a bit of a drag for you without those handy pills of yours?”

“It was a drag with them, too.”

“Look at you. The reformed sinner. _Sherlock_. Don’t you want to know?”

“Always. Know what in particular, this time?”

“How I’m going to make you kill yourself.”

Sherlock looked at her, and said quite evenly, “She’ll be out of the city by now.” Her voice had the blandness of terrible irrelevancy. Her throat was full.

“You think that means she’s safe?”

“No.”

“Good.” Moriarty breathed in through her nose and settled comfortably back in her chair. “So let me explain to you how Joan is going to escape with her life. In France, I have the Germans. And they’ll kill her if I don’t signal to them. But say I do, and she gets on that plane scot-free. Well, I have people in England, too, and there…it’ll be much more complex. Much more public, much more messy.” She inspected her right hand thoughtfully. “ _Someone_ ’s been passing information to the Gestapo, you see. And unless my good friends in Baker Street hear otherwise—they know who to suspect.”

Sherlock met her eyes. “Oh,” she said. “No. You—”

“I’d say they’d try to keep it out of the headlines—but I have some friends in the press, too, you know. Mm-hm. It might not be soon, it might be years from now, but it’ll happen. There’s always a leak. Always a loophole. Think of it: BRITISH SPY TURNS TRAITOR. I mean, that’s going to be the headline anyway, but which name do you want to be splashed over the papers? Joan Watson? Or Sherlock Holmes? And hey, think of it this way—if you take the blame and then you kill yourself, then the courts don’t get the pleasure of seeing either of you hanged.”

_Does that mean—_

“So, let’s get a signal to London first of all, so that my good friends will know that it’s not Joan Watson they need to prosecute for treason and espionage. Shall we? Get your wireless set,” said Moriarty. “You’re going to leave a note.”

_—it’s my fault again?_

Sherlock stared at her for a few moments but Moriarty didn’t move. Just smiled her detached smile and looked back at Sherlock with eyes like holes. Slowly, Sherlock got up, crossed the room, picked up the black leather suitcase and set it on the table. She snapped open its clasps and unwound the power cord, and plugged the radio in. No point wasting the battery, she thought, and then realised: well, no, that wasn’t true, was it?

She was going to die. She blinked at the wireless set as she sat down. She was going to die.

“Ready?” said Moriarty. “I know your security checks, by the way. You have to include ten dummy letters before, five dummy letters after, or dear old Blighty will think the Germans have got their grubby paws on you. Imagine.”

“Don’t insult me by assuming I’d rely on security checks,” Sherlock murmured. “It’s not like Baker Street follows up on them if they’re absent.”

Moriarty laughed. “No. The coding section back at home has a lot to answer for, doesn’t it? So. Need a pen and paper?”

“I can code in my head.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You can write it,” Moriarty said, shrugging. “I’m not unreasonable. A confession’s a personal thing. I’ll watch your hand. Don’t think I won’t see what you’re saying.”

Sherlock closed her eyes.

Blackness. Quiet. With her eyes closed, the smell of sex in the air was stronger. There was a faint tinge of Joan’s particular scent, too: the rankle of her sweat. Sherlock put her teeth together, breathed slowly, then opened her eyes. She looked to Moriarty, who looked back at her. 

“Go on,” Moriarty said. “Say you did it. You passed on information to the Germans. For fun. For glory. For whatever reason. I mean, they’ve already got half the proof. Ever heard of a British spy coming out of a Gestapo interrogation with the Gestapo’s apologies before?”

Sherlock smiled thinly. “That was,” she said, polite and demure, “really very clever of you.” Then she put on her headphones, and came on air.

Ten minutes later she took her headphones off, and sat back. 

“You’re fast,” said Moriarty.

Sherlock raised an eyebrow. “You kept up,” she said, and Moriarty inclined her head gracefully.

“So,” Moriarty said. Her voice was soothing, a little breathy. “That’s London dealt with. If dear Joan can get on that plane, she’ll be just fine. Do you know her middle name, by the way?”

“What?”

“Joan. Her middle name.”

“It—no.”

“Harmonia. Joan Harmonia Watson. Isn’t that a hoot?”

Sherlock’s brain stuttered. Her mouth opened, then closed. Too late, she realised that Moriarty had been angling to throw her off, and had done just that. She said, “Yes. Hilarious. You were saying?”

“Oh,” said Moriarty, her eyes glistening and her smile pink, wide, “now you’re invested in the proceedings? Finally.”

Sherlock swallowed audibly and didn’t respond. After a few moments of silence, Moriarty gave a huffing chuckle, shaking her head fondly. “Alright,” she said. “If Joan can get on that plane, she’ll be, er—flying. Pun inexcusable, sorry. So now all you have to do, my dear, is stand where my man in the building opposite can see you—good catch, by the way—and take your L pill. Then he’ll pick up his radio and call off the Gestapo search for Angeline Mercier.”

Joan Harmonia Watson. It was a little funny. Strange, too, that Sherlock had never known that. She thought of Joan’s face like an open rose. “You can’t scare me off,” Joan had said. Sherlock realised that she was getting to her feet.

The window was wide, smudged, curtainless. When Sherlock rested her hand against the glass she disturbed dust. Cold soaked into her palm.

Slowly, she began to laugh.

“What,” said Moriarty, after a few moments, and her voice sounded jolted, disconcerted. “What—”

She whipped around, caught Moriarty in the full glare of her savage grin. 

“So close,” she said. “So close. But the thing is, you’re in communication, aren’t you, with your agents. With your man in the building opposite. You can call this off at any moment. There’s a safety catch. A signal. From you to him. I don’t have to do anything but work out what it is—”

“Oh,” said Moriarty, standing up as if she were being pulled by strings, “oh, Sherlock, what have you noticed—”

“So,” Sherlock said, almost purred, stepped closer; “I’m going to be just fine, _my dear_ , and so’s Joan, because I’ve—got—you.”

“Yes,” Moriarty said, an almost painful ecstacy running through her voice; “yes, you’ve got me—  
oh, thank you, thank you;” and with one hand she reached to touch Sherlock’s face, but the other was groping inside her jacket—

Sherlock surged forwards. She grabbed Moriarty’s wrist: crack. She drove her knee up into her stomach: a soft _ugh_. The heel of her left hand slammed upwards into Moriarty’s jaw. In her right hand was the grip of Moriarty’s gun.

There was a heaving silence, a war-blasted silence, a silence that lasted for three seconds and forever. Then:

“You’re _insane_ ,” Sherlock spat, clinging onto the word as an imperfect descriptor, trying to make it make sense.

Panting quietly, Moriarty struggled up from the floor. Sherlock kept the gun trained on her.

She had to grip the side of the table, her knuckles blanching and her fingers slipping. She was grinning through bubbles of blood and spit. Sherlock didn’t try to stop her, and didn’t lower the pistol.

“You’d kill yourself,” Sherlock said, “to cut me off from any chance of survival?”

“And you,” said Moriarty, voice thick and gleeful, “you’re thinking of killing yourself to save Joan Watson. Still. Aren’t you? So which of us, Sherlock, is crazy?” She shoved herself upright and wiped her mouth with her thumb, tutted. “I have to say, it’s very stupid to point a gun at someone prepared to die. What are you trying to achieve?”

“You try holding a gun _neutrally_ ,” Sherlock nearly shouted, and screwed up her mouth tight as Moriarty began to laugh again, wheezing red laughter which racked her whole body. The gun wavered then Sherlock locked her wrist again, gritted her teeth, kept it steady.

“Your sniper,” she said, when Moriarty’s laughing fit had calmed to a few whimpering giggles.

“Aha. Ha. Yes?”

“He hasn’t shot me. You don’t just want me dead; it has to be by my own hand. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“So he has orders not to shoot me.”

“Well,” Moriarty said, smiling. “Something like that.”

The gun was wavering and Sherlock hated it, wanted to throw it away from her. The metal felt oily under her fingers. Sweat was slipping down her brow. “What,” she said, “would be the point in that?” But she knew already that she was looking at the problem from the wrong angle. She could see it in the slant of Moriarty’s smile, the dark crackle in her eyes. She swallowed. 

“Damn,” she said, and it sounded ridiculous. Something one said after spilling sugar. She could taste metal in her mouth. Her clarity was blurring again, and not coming back. Her chest hurt. “Damn you. He’s not a sniper. He doesn’t have a gun.”

“No,” said Moriarty, a giggle caught in her throat and her eyes somehow desperate. “No, he has a camera.”

_My fault again._

“Call it off,” Sherlock said, “call it off.”

“Begging? You’re just _begging_ me now? Kill me. Shoot me!”

“You’re in communication with the sniper, you as good as said I was right—”

“No,” Moriarty hissed, “I said you’d _got_ me.”

“But there has to be a safety catch—”

“My God! No! What do you think this is? A game? This is serious. This is our last bow. There’s no safety catch, there’s no _just in case_ , there’s nothing like that. You don’t get out of it, Sherlock. I want you to burn,” Moriarty said, her teeth bare, tiny white teeth in carnivorous rows. The gun was shaking wildly. “I want to take you and your reputation to the grave with me. So go on, Sherlock Holmes. You know how to save her. And so many other people. But the thing is you don’t care, do you. It’s just for her. So come on, Sherlock Holmes. After everything you’ve failed to sort out. After everything you couldn’t solve, you can solve _this_ , you can save her, you can save—”

Sherlock put two bullets through Moriarty’s head to stop her saying Joan’s name.

The quiet afterwards, Sherlock thought, was monumental and shattered: an eleventh-of-the-eleventh silence. She couldn’t feel her own fingers and was surprised by the accuracy of her two shots. The pool of blood on the floor widened with surprising quickness. She blinked and realised she was seeing the after-images of a camera flash. Yes. Of course.

After stepping over Moriarty’s body and putting the gun down on the table, Sherlock reached into her pockets and withdrew her lighter. She paused, considering a last cigarette, but then there was no reason to draw this out too long.

She knocked the lighter against the table and the bottom compartment snapped off. She reached inside, took out a single pill.

She moved to the window but didn’t look out; just held the pill aloft between her thumb and index finger.

Joan would laugh, her rich gold rough laugh: bloody theatrics.

No, Joan wouldn’t laugh.

She thought: almost immediate, isn’t it? And she lowered her hand, put the pill on her tongue, swallowed: waited.

* * *

Aside from the pilot and co-pilot, there were four other people with Joan on the flight back to England: men with faces like creased paper, weary eyes, and faint, disbelieving smiles when they met each other’s eye. They didn’t speak to her much but they insisted she take one of the seats, while two of their number lay on their stomachs on the floor of the plane. They offered her the flask of whiskey they were passing around. She took it.

They jolted through the sky, and Joan closed her eyes.

Without realising she had fallen asleep, she woke up when they were dropping: gasped, then shook herself fully awake and felt the hard smack of wheels hitting the ground beneath her. The plane reeled and she gripped hard at the seat, swore in unison with the man next to her. The whiskey briefly stung the back of her throat, threatening to return, but she swallowed hard and breathed hard and the nausea receded. And then she thought: I’m back, and the four men with her must have realised the same thing because one said, “My God,” and another started to laugh, then another, until Joan caught the feeling too and began to howl along with them.

Scrubbing their eyes with the heels of their hands and gripping each other freely—Joan co-opted into the group for a few confusing, stumbling seconds—they all got to their feet. “Nice work, gents,” said one, “nice work,” and Joan had a pang: it would have been good to be on the same flight as Sherlock, to clap her shoulder and tell her she’d done well. Her hands suddenly felt empty. But no matter.

She struggled to the door, her chest full of sudden bright, aching _home_ ness—not quite happiness—as she jumped down onto the tarmac beneath, shoving her hair back from her face and taking a gulp of air:

Two men grabbed her arms, and another advanced, and the homeness vanished and the world snapped and then—she didn’t know how it happened—but she broke free and one of the men who had held her arms was crying out as he hit the ground and the other was bent double. And her breath was wild and hot and a good bright kind of pain burst in her knuckles as she drove her fist into the mouth of the third man—

“ _Fuck_!”

Joan stumbled back.

Harding, his mouth full of blood, stood before her, blinking animal pain out of his eyes. “Chrissakes, Watson,” he growled, and she said, “Sir,” and then he was grabbing her, turning her around, seizing her wrists, and her cheek was against the cold metal of the plane’s side.

She was panting. There was a weight gone from her side—and behind her, the clank of her gun being thrown to the ground. Harding’s grip was like iron.

“Sir,” she said, “what—”

“Don’t,” he muttered into her ear. Hot breath tickling her throat. She was gasping, blinking, trying to understand what was happening. “Stay quiet. Alright? Listen to me. ”

He leant back a little and Joan could tell that what he said next, though it was supposedly addressed to her, was meant for all to hear. “I will fix this,” he said, and his voice had gun-metal in it. “This was my operation and you’re my agent. Leave it to me. There has been one unholy fuck-up, but I will _put this right_.”

For a few moments the only sounds were the whine of cooling engines and the flutter of birds and Joan’s own heartbeat. She was breathing choppily, sweat soaking her blouse. “Now,” Harding said, and his tone was still steely but now quieter, private, tempered, held back with vicious, audible restraint. “Help me sort this out, Watson. Don’t make it more complicated than it already is. Don’t get smart, don’t get economical with the truth. And for God’s sake don’t lose that bloody temper of yours.”

Joan managed to get her mouth around the words, “Yes sir.”

“Good.”

He pulled her away from the plane and held her wrists while they cuffed her. Then he spat blood onto the ground and wiped his mouth. “Bloody incompetence,” he said with a red sneer, addressing the two soldiers flanking Joan. “How many men does it take to drag off an unsuspecting woman, exactly? Jesus Christ.”

When Joan caught his eye, he gave a tight nod that meant _trust me_. Joan choked down a huge gulp of air like she was preparing to dive—then nodded, and let herself be pulled onwards.

Sights moved by in bright, surreal detail. Colours were painfully loud. Every time Joan blinked the world seemed to need realigning. She saw things in jumps. _What’s happened what’s happened what’s happened is it Sherlock is oh God is it what has she what’s happened_.

The world started again, more coherently this time but not very. She was sitting down opposite two unfamiliar men, one sandy and broad, the other dark and swamped by his suit. The soldiers who had dragged her stood by the door of the small room they were in. 

Her throat was raw, her head light. There was a coppery tang in her mouth and cold sweat prickling beneath her clothes. The cuffs attaching her to the chair gave a metallic clink at her every movement. She looked to her left. There was a mirror which couldn’t be anything but one-way. She raised her eyebrows and shook her head even though she was dizzy.

“Sort of shooting yourselves in the foot using the interrogation techniques you taught me to deal with, aren’t you?” she asked, her voice tense, ragged, polite, momentarily forgetting Harding’s instructions and then regretting her words—but only a little. 

One of the men opposite her opened his mouth, but Joan interrupted him with, “ _What’s happened_.”

The two interrogators looked to each other, and one—the sandy one—pushed a manila file gently across the table, then opened it. “We wonder,” he said—he had a pleasant, refined voice, his tone always, it seemed, apologising for disturbing the silence, “if you could be so kind as to tell us a few things about this woman. On the left.”

The photograph was grainy, taken through a window. Light bounced oddly off the glass, creating white smears. Visible on the left, nonetheless, was Sherlock—Joan recognised the tangled bloom of her hair, the Arctic swoop of her throat, the weaponish cast of her jaw.

She didn’t recognise the gun in her hand or the woman she was pointing it at.

She raised her eyes to the man’s face. “You know who she is,” she said, voice firm. “She’s on your payroll. Sherlock Holmes. Where is she.”

The man took a deep breath through his nose, nostrils widening. He smiled in a way that looked a little as if he had toothache and managed to frown at the same time. It was, perhaps, meant to be mournful. It wasn’t. “Your friend?”

“Yes. My friend. More than my friend,” she took a deep breath, “my _colleague_. Where is she. She was meant to be back. Where—”

The sandy gentleman reached over and moved the pictures in the file, taking the first away to show what was beneath it. It had evidently been taken a moment afterwards. There was more blood; it was blurred with motion.

“What do you make of Miss Holmes’ activities as a German spy, Lieutenant?” said the other man, the small and dark one, whose eyes were sunken and whose mouth was over large, and Joan stared at him.

She said, “Assistant Section Officer.”

“Hm?”

“Assistant Section Officer. Not Miss. She’s in the WAAF, she’s an officer—” 

And then Joan started to laugh, tried to reach up to push back her hair but remembered that her wrists were cuffed to the chair: “Jesus! A German spy, she’s, no, Christ. Christ! Is this what you’re charging her with? Jesus—no, no, she’s—no.” Swallowing laughter, staring into the blank, polite faces of the men across the table. “ _No_.”

“Lieutenant—”

“I bet,” Joan said, “she’s giving you hell over this in some other room.” She could picture it; Sherlock’s laughing sneers, her twisted mouth. Her heart cried out for her, clogged her throat. “Christ. You want to know what’s happening in those pictures? I’ll tell you. She’s saving your necks.”

“She’s committing murder, just after confessing to committing treason.”

“You don’t know a thing,” Joan growled, cuffs rattling, laughter still catching in her throat, teeth bared, “this is great, I mean, Jesus, I bet she’s having the time of her life with you people—”

“Sherlock Holmes,” said the sandy man, in his apologetic, pressing tones, “is dead.”

Joan stared with her face frozen half way between grin and snarl. Her throat convulsed. She laughed again.

“Yeah,” she said eventually, “yeah, I’d—I’d tell me that too. In your situation. Where is she? This isn’t funny, where is she? She’s not dead, and she’s not a German spy. She’s not dead. No, she’s not dead.”

The sandy man was rearranging papers on the desk, trying to call her attention to something, but Joan could only hear her own gasping breath and her own voice saying over and over again, “No, sorry, she’s not, she’s not dead,” as the cuffs clinked and her throat spasmed.

“ _Lieutenant_ ,” said the dark, sunken-looking man, and she finally heard him. She shook her head mutely because she had run out of breath to protest with. “At 12:33 last Monday, Holmes sent the transmission in front of you. It’s all in order. Our best cryptographers agree there’s no forgery.” Joan looked down dumbly but her vision was swimming. “Approximately an hour later she murdered one of her fellow agents, Rita Brook, who had followed her due to suspicions about her loyalties. Almost immediately after, she took her L-pill.”

There was more but Joan didn’t hear it. She shook her head; the man kept speaking, talking about the time Joan had left the house, the last time she had spoken to her; talking about Sherlock’s connections with the Gestapo, talking about her arrest, her brief stint in custody. “Our agent Judge records a message from you yourself stating that Holmes had been taken in, and yet you expected her to escape…” Talking. Talking and talking. “No,” Joan said, “no, no,” until she dropped her head, gasped for breath, stayed silent with her eyes shut, exhausted. And then she got angry; and then she got exhausted; and then she got angry; and then exhausted once more. Still the dark man spoke. Occasionally the sandy man would manipulate the papers and the pictures on the table, or offer a gentle interjection. Sometimes Joan tried to answer a question and sometimes, despite her reputation, she made threats, and sometimes she bargained and sometimes she tried to explain; she asked, more than once, for them to just let her see Sherlock. The cuffs clinked.

The door crashed open with a metallic shriek and bang and cold air broke over Joan’s sweat-sodden face.

“Right,” said Harding, and Joan slumped back in her chair, waiting for Sherlock to be at his elbow—but it was just Harding.

“Sir,” she said, and Harding said, “Shut up, Watson,” then looked to the men across from her, striding over.

“I’ve got permission from above to take this clearly dangerous criminal off your hands,” he announced. Spitting his words. His fingers were warm and rough as he unlocked the cuffs—where had he gotten the key? Joan’s curiousity flared then spluttered out.

The sandy man’s face had hardened but the dark man just looked bored and resigned. Joan was staggering to her feet. More words were exchanged; she heard the noises of speech clanging in her ears, fading in and out, but didn’t bother to inquire into their meaning. Then Harding looked to her and said, “I said let’s go, Lieutenant, _move_ ,” and she moved, stiff but upright.

Once more the world began to stop and start. Everything faded. Joan resurfaced in the back of a taxi, rubbing her wrists, Harding handing her a bundle of clothing, saying, “It’s just your BD. I’ll send someone to pick up the rest of your stuff tomorrow.”

Joan took it and said, “Is it true?”

Harding said, “I’m sorry.”

Another stop; another blank space. The next time Joan surfaced, they were in the living room of some low-lit, scruffy flat which smelt of damp dog and stale coffee—a personal bolthole, Harding called it, though when Joan couldn’t remember—he was pushing a glass of water into her hand and she was shaking her head. 

“Drink it.”

“She can’t be dead.”

“Drink it, Lieutenant.”

She drank it and he took the glass off her. He said, too, at some point: “I’ll organise a safe flat for you to go to tomorrow.” And at another point: “Don’t bother trying to hold it together, Watson, it’s not bloody worth it.”

And then she was on the sofa and making horrible choking noises as she sobbed, Harding having left the room to give her privacy; and then, _then_ she must have fallen asleep, because she woke up to sunlight blossoming gold across the whole room, burning her eyelids, on the first day of not having Sherlock.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AAAAAA
> 
> Thanks so much for reading. Sorry to make you wait for me—last night I very foolishly thought, "Oh, I'll have one glass of wine watching The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and be back in front of my laptop by ten," and before I knew it I was a bottle in, sprawled on a sofa and shrieking, "Oh, it's so _Beckett_!" at the screen as my friends and I tried to one-up each other for intensely meaningless critical analysis. (Killer film, by the way). The next chapter will arrive on Monday February 24th, and it is named "Like Any Other Londoner". That's right, we're back where the prologue left us! And we have _notes_.
> 
>  **"polished his glasses on the fat end of his tie"** \- So, this _isn't_ George Smiley of Karla trilogy (and other) fame, but it is a bit of an impudent nod to his most famous habit. Also, in _A Murder of Quality_ , which is (I think?) the first novel he appears in, there is an old, homeless, mentally ill woman who is unjustly accused of a murder.
> 
>  **"security checks"** \- These were agreed-upon idiosyncrasies like 'always mispell the second word of your message' or 'always insert five dummy letters between the third and fourth words of your message'. A wireless operator who had, for example, been captured and was being forced to send deceptive messages, would omit these checks, thus alerting the people recieving the message to the fact that they were transmitting under duress and therefore compromised. It also meant that wireless operators couldn't be impersonated if their sets were captured. At least, that was the theory. In practice, SOE was incredibly lax about following up investigations into missing security checks; Leo Marks, in his memoirs, recounts his fury over being unable to convince his higher-ups that omitted security checks were a big deal. In one terrible case, an agent who had been captured and forced to transmit misleading information sent a message with his security checks left out, and SOE responded quite normally with an irritable note reminding him to use the check next time.


	24. Like Any Other Londoner.

**6TH JANUARY 1943  
LONDON**

There had been bombings a few years ago. Joan, like every other Londoner, had gotten accustomed to the strange yellowy grey mornings-after when everybody came stumbling out into the all-clear and tried to work out what was and wasn’t still there.

She woke up with a quiet start on the day of Sherlock’s funeral and didn’t reach for her in the empty space, because they hadn’t spent enough time sharing a bed for sleeping beside her to be a habit. Instead, with complete, strange, early wakefulness, Joan blinked at the letter which rested on her pillow; the letter which, a few days ago, Mycroft Holmes had given her. 

_“Before my sister left for France, she entrusted to me a letter, to be delivered to you in case anything calamitous should happen.”_

_“Was that her wording? Did she say ‘anything calamitous’?”_

_“No. She said it was to be given to you in the event of her death.”_

Joan sat up slowly, drawing the sheets around her. The blackout curtains weren’t closed; she hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on in the bedroom yesterday. She had spent her day in the sitting room, sitting opposite an empty chair. She prefered to wake up with the sunshine anyway.

The letter was in her hand again. Ridiculous. Stupid. She should stop rereading it. She reread it anyway.

_Joan,_

_I’m a traitor. Harding will tell you; Lestrade will tell you; Sally will absolutely tell you, and if Molly hesitates, you should reassure her that she’s right. I want you to tell everyone._

_I met you in France, Montmartre to be exact, in 1937. It wasn’t a long acquaintance—we only spoke once—but I caught snatches of gossip about you so often before and after actually meeting you that I felt like I knew you. I had shorter hair and worse judgement then, which is perhaps why you didn’t recognise me when we met again in Wanborough. I took advantage of your lapse in memory, and reeled off all that I remembered about you—to impress you. To make you think I was special, interesting. In fact, that’s why I passed information to the Germans. To be special, interesting. That’s all, Joan. It was just a trick, and you shouldn’t feel sorry to lose me._

_Goodbye._

 _VR_

Joan closed her eyes tight, left the letter on her pillow, and made herself get up. She had no intention of going to the funeral, but she didn’t want to lie still.

* * *

The house was owned, or kept—Joan didn’t know which—by Mrs Hudson, a fluttering, birdlike woman in her sixties who liked to ply Joan with tea and try to keep her spirits up. SOE employed her in some capacity, as far as Joan understood it, but she still longed to be ‘really doing something’, as she put it; she often wanted Joan to talk about her time doing war work, but ‘nothing you’d get into trouble for telling me, of course’—so Joan would plumb her memories for stories from her days as a driver, and tell them without much enthusiasm.

Still, Joan spent a while each day talking to her; there were a lot of hours to fill, after all, and Mrs Hudson was a kind sort. She also always had surprising amounts of tea and biscuits, though no sugar: she liked sweetener much more, she confided quite absently to Joan, as if this were the only reason to have it. Joan didn’t bother to inquire. Her past scruples about the black market had been somewhat worn away by her time in France. There were worse things in the world. She ate the biscuits Mrs Hudson insisted she eat, and she talked about driving.

“Isn’t it today?” Mrs Hudson said that morning. “The funeral, I mean. For your friend.”

Yes. It was. The funeral for Joan’s friend Assistant Section Officer Holmes who had died in Malta, doing signalling work. Joan considered her tea. “Yes,” she said, putting her cup down. “I don’t want to go. She’d understand.”

“You know it might help,” said Mrs Hudson, but Joan shook her head.

* * *

“Thanks, Clarence,” Joan said quietly, on the way out of Clarence’s narrow, neat house. He was a schoolmaster. Protected occupation. Still he got called a coward. He had soft brown hair and a soft brown smile and eyes like steel. When Joan said, “I’m sorry about you and Harry,” she really meant it.

Clarence shook his head. “I hope the number works,” he said, and let her out. Joan walked to a phonebox and took out the strip of paper on which Clarence had jotted down a phone number. She lifted the reciever and her heart jumped when someone picked up, but it was a woman whose voice she didn’t recognise and when she asked for Harry Watson, she was told, “Not here, miss, not since weeks ago. Think he’s in Plymouth, maybe? Could be Plymouth. Portsmouth. One of those places. Sorry, don’t have a number.”

* * *

Joan didn’t limp. Nonetheless she felt old. Raising her head absently and looking down the street—keeping a calm watch on her surroundings and absently making sure she wasn’t being followed—she caught a shock of curly black hair that nearly made her gasp aloud, heart blooming in her chest: but it was a stranger, and she had stopped in the middle of the street. An older woman crashed into her.

“ _Pardon_ —” She could barely choke it out.

The woman muttered, “French! Might have known,” and sped off, and Joan watched her go, marking how her shopping bags bounced by her sides as she kept her shoulders angrily rigid. What on earth could she be hurrying for, she wondered? The war wouldn’t be over for a long time; and Sherlock was dead; and how she managed to fill those bags, Joan had no idea; and Sherlock was dead.

She took a deep breath and tried not to sway. Christ. No. Not in public. Not like this. She dug her fingernails into her palm and walked forwards.

* * *

The small decisions of life kept evading and confusing her. After agonising distantly over whether or not to go in search of a meal, she was finally seized with a violent urge to buy cigarettes. So she did, and smoked one on a street corner, and felt sick for it. She realised that her left hand shook whenever she raised it; realised that she was only smoking in order to rehearse little bits of Sherlock, trying to catch onto her. It was like trying to hold water in her hands.

The day began to draw in cold and grey, the January chill deepening and nipping at Joan’s cheeks and nose. She moved through the streets not meeting the eyes of those around her. The blackout began to wind its way about the city. So few lights. A city of closed eyes. Trembling lashes. Sherlock’s blue-veined and quaking eyelids. She remembered how, early on, nearly a year ago now, she had thought there was something familiar about Sherlock’s voice—but that had been because of her sister, ’phoning her up in that strange way. She was sure. And yet it was so confused now, in hindsight. Sherlock’s voice was everywhere; she caught it in the murmur of strangers, the burble of the wireless through thin walls, on the edge of her own dreams. Because it was everywhere, it was hard to pin down.

VR, she thought: VR, VR, VR.

When she got in, Mrs Hudson opened the door and said, “There were two ladies asking for you, Lieutenant Watson.”

“Oh? Yes?”

“Yes. A Molly Hooper—lovely girl. She left a number, and said you should telephone her. Though she said it was the number of her work, not her house. Should I fetch it for you?”

“I—no. Just leave it on the hall table. Who was with her?”

“Sally Donovan, she said her name was.”

Joan stopped in the middle of taking off her battered leather jacket, closed her eyes. She said, “So she’s back, is she,” her voice rough and murmuring. Then: “If she ever comes by here again when I’m not in—”

“Yes?”

Joan shook her head, and said, “I’m not going to speak to her,” climbing the stairs.

Sally had informed Baker Street of her suspicions surrounding Sherlock’s arrest by and subsequent escape from the Gestapo. Sally had never been on Sherlock’s side.

* * *

VR. Victoire Renaud. A false name. Why sign a false name? Because the rest of the letter wasn’t true?

—and it wasn’t.

But—

VR, VR, VR. Joan thought that if she had a gun she would shoot the letters into the wall. But then again if she had a gun she might not want to.

* * *

Joan woke up and for four weightless seconds didn’t remember anything. Then she realised that the phone was ringing, and that she was alone.

She stumbled down in her pajamas to snatch up the receiver. “Yes,” she croaked, “yes, what is it.”

“They’ve found her.”

But of course Harding didn’t say that—for it was Harding on the end of the phone, his creaking smoke-worn voice wryly friendly. Instead he said, “Watson. Disturb your beauty sleep?”

Joan rubbed her mouth, caught her own bedraggled reflection in the mirror above the mantelpiece. “Don’t joke,” she said, struggling to sound light, “I need it.”

There was a buzzing silence, during which Harding pointedly didn’t laugh. “Right,” he said at the end of it. “Want to press your case?”

“What?”

“You know what, Watson.”

“I—”

“I’ve got you an appointment with the Director of the Inter-Service Research Board tomorrow. Nine-thirty. Do you want to press your case?”

“Oh,” said Joan. “I—yes. Yes.”

“Good,” Harding barked. “I’ll send a runner with your uniform allowance, God knows it’s overdue. Get your hands on an officer’s uniform sharpish, you’ll need it. I’ll see you soon.”

“Right. Yes.”

“Watson?”

“Yes?”

“Same rules. Don’t get clever and don’t get angry. Just tell him what happened.”

There was a crunch of disconnection. “Thank you,” Joan said to a dead line.

Slowly, she replaced the handset and pushed her hair back from her forehead. Her throat was very dry and very tight. Good of him. Very good of him.

She would have to get her evidence together. Have to think like Sherlock, however one did that. But at the moment she just felt numb.

Going back to sleep wasn’t an option. Instead, Joan went up to dress, then came down to breakfast in Mrs Hudson’s kitchen. From the table she watched the world move outside the window, sitting in front of a scraped-clean plate and an empty mug. Rain hissed. Mrs Hudson quickly took the crockery away, and Joan blinked, then said too late: “No, don’t, I can—”

But Mrs Hudson was already dunking them into the soap-lathered sink, the sleeves of her old-fashioned dress rolled up above her elbows, insisting, “You just sit there.”

So Joan just sat there, slumping back a little. On the window, the rain was making patterns of light and shade: white and grey.

She would have to collect her evidence for Sherlock’s innocence and put everything in order, but it felt like an insurmountable task. And the evidence was against her, anyway. She should burn that damnable note, for a start...

“You know,” Mrs Hudson said, after a few moments of clanking, splashing quiet, “I know what it’s like, losing friends.”

Joan closed her eyes and tried to have patience. The word _friend_ had, of late, a sour tinge to it. Joan supposed she would never get to say to anyone, “She wasn’t _just_ …”

“Yes?” she said, a moment late, trying to sound properly attentive; cracking open her eyes and fixing them on Mrs Hudson’s prim, pale shape, her elbows moving vigorously as she scrubbed.

“Oh yes,” Mrs Hudson said, quite gaily but with something reserved about the undertone of her voice. Like a split stocking under a neat skirt. Still, she was smiling faintly. Joan frowned. “My friend Margaret—oh, she was a wild one.”

Joan scrunched her eyebrows closer together, flexing her left hand over and over. “Oh?”

“ _Sho_ cking,” Mrs Hudson affirmed, smiling still. “We were living together, you see—after my Albert died. Margaret never married, of course, and it was just sensible.” She plucked a tea towel from the side and began to dry the mug Joan had been drinking from, her whole frame engaged in the movement quite unthinkingly. Her voice seemed to get stronger, but stayed calm all the same: “This was where we lived, you know. I think it belonged to her aunt once—something like that.”

Joan was blinking, wondering if Mrs Hudson knew what it sounded like. “Oh,” she said again, a little stupidly, watching her.

“Yes,” Mrs Hudson said, as if Joan had actually made some important point. “Oh, she was wild. Of course, when she died—well. I had to sell the house. Couldn’t keep it up myself, and anyway—it was always a bit quiet without her bustling about—getting under my feet—being _such_ a terror—” her voice was broken up by laughter, then subdued by something which made Joan swallow, staring “—oh, I don’t know. Silly goose could barely light a fire, imagine. But then the Board came along.” Mrs Hudson always referred to SOE as the Board. Joan supposed it was a matter of security. “Course, they didn’t pay the asking price—but they did say I could stay on, and that the house wouldn’t be empty. And I thought, well—”

She put the mug down, having dried it within an inch of her life. Slowly, patiently, she rested her hands on the side of the counter. Joan saw that they were trembling slightly, though there was still a faint smile pressing at her lips. She turned, pushing back her smile; when she looked at Joan, her eyes were kind.

“I mean, Lieutenant,” she said, “don’t think I’m being too familiar, but—you’ve got to keep some things. And you’ve got to move on with others. If I hadn’t stayed here—oh, I’d have regretted it. But if I’d tried to keep it going alone, with just me rattling about in it—I’d have regretted that too.”

Joan, mouth dry, stiff and uncomfortable and feeling unworthy of confidences, managed to say, “I, yeah. Yeah, I—thanks, Mrs Hudson.”

Mrs Hudson clucked her tongue and seized the tea towel again: “Don’t thank me!”

“Sorry, I just—” _What sort of a friend was she?_ But there was no call to ask that, she decided, cutting herself off viciously.

“Nevermind _you just_ ,” Mrs Hudson said, far from unkindly, as she held a plate up to dry it. Joan thought: VR, VR, VR, her breath coming a little short and a little hitchingly. “I’m an awful nag, I know. Don’t mind me.”

“No. Really. Thank you.” Joan looked away.

Had she met Sherlock in a bar in 1937?

No. God, no. Of course not. So either the note meant something else, or it was a forgery.

Forgery.

She looked to Mrs Hudson again and said, “Actually—I think I’ll head out for a walk.”

“You go, dear. The fresh air’ll do you good.”

It wasn’t the fresh air, in the end, that did Joan good; it was the phonebox she ducked into, knowing as she did that the phone in Baker Street would be tapped. She didn’t expect, of course, that the line she was calling would be secure, and yet it felt better to place this call outside of the flat, and away from the street which had become a byword for surveillance.

SOE had been wrong about Sherlock. Had cut her loose. Had cut them both loose. After everything Sherlock had done for them—Joan slammed coins into the slot, hand shaking with anger now—after everything Sherlock had done for them they had thrown her to the dogs, and it had taken Harding to so much as get her an audience with the Director.

The line crackled to life. “Lieutenant Watson,” Joan said, voice betraying none of the anger which was thumping through her, the first thing she had really felt in days. “Yes. No. Yes, thanks. Uh, Hooper. Molly Hooper—Ensign Hooper? ...Oh. Uh, yes, of course. Lieutenant Hooper, then, please.” The woman on the end of the line said something, and Joan sucked in a breath through her teeth. “Sergeant,” she said, and her voice was as pleasant and as threatening as ever Major Harding’s had been; “if I’ve got this number, do you really think anything you know could possibly be news to me?”

* * *

The café in the Natural Science Museum was quiet, almost empty, with a stately oldness in the air which seemed to refute the existence of any war going on outside. Molly was seated at a table. As Joan watched, she stood, crossed the floor: the tiled floor rang out at every touch of her shoes.

Her hug was unexpected and entirely impossible to fend off, and Joan stared numbly over her shoulder, slowly raising her hands to hold onto her waist. She smelt of glue and talc and was soft to the touch.

“I heard,” Molly said, her face pressed to Joan’s shoulder, and then she stepped back. Her hands remained on Joan’s upper arms and she gave a short, sharp sigh, biting her lip for a moment. “I’m so sorry, Joan.”

Joan swallowed hard on a blockage in her throat, shrugged and then winced, because why would anyone _shrug_ at that, as if to say _it’s really nothing_ —but Molly had that look of grave, tranquil understanding in her eyes, and she was talking quietly into Joan’s silence.

“I was at the funeral the other day. Sort of strange, I didn’t know she had a sister, and then—well, we met when she was asking me to...to come. It was nice. I mean, it wasn’t nice. But it was—you know.”

“I—yeah,” Joan said. “I didn’t—I, uh, couldn’t. Couldn’t really go.”

“No,” said Molly. “No, I know.”

Joan swallowed, felt the tendons in her neck pull tight. Molly couldn’t have heard the full story, or her eyes wouldn’t be so clear, her expression so firm and sensible and horribly gentle. “No,” Joan said.

There was a pause.

“Let’s sit down,” Molly said, brightly.

Joan nodded her acquiesence and followed Molly to the table she had come to, taking her in as she did so. While her officer’s uniform was nothing if not neat, Molly had dropped her feverish attempts at military bearing for something softer and more relaxed which, through suiting her better, made her seem much more controlled. Beside her, Joan was oddly conscious of her own straight spine and polished boots—the line she had struggled to press in her trousers, and the coat she liked because it matched them in colour if not in material, almost as if she were wearing a suit—as if trying to say _look, I’m neat, I can’t be miserable_. But Molly moved comfortably in her slightly-too-big skirt, and framed by her slightly tumbledown hair her face bloomed pale and pretty. She had remembered to take off her cap. “You look well,” Joan said.

“Oh, thanks,” Molly said, smiling up at her. She had chosen the table well, Joan noted automatically; out of the view of the window and the door while keeping the latter in her line of sight, and not being so clumsy or so obvious as to try and huddle in the corner to keep people from seeing them. There was a pot of tea on the table top already, and a plate of cakes.

Joan waited for Molly to say _so do you_ , and was slightly relieved when she didn’t. She sat opposite her. “So,” Joan said, “Forgery’s based here, is it?”

“My part,” Molly said, in her measured and earnest way, “yes.”

“What’s your part?”

“Well,” Molly said, flushing a little. “Well, artefacts rather than documents, chiefly—mostly textiles. The dressmakers alter all the clothes, but I do some specialised things—you know, things which need to double up for—other things.”

“Suitcases,” Joan said, thinking of Sherlock’s dusty black suitcase, and the wireless set it concealed—the case she had lugged all through Paris, until—until. Joan’s mouth twitched. She flexed her left hand, breathing slowly out of her nose and concentrating on what Molly was saying:

“Ever so many suitcases. Apparently I’ve got a very French style of stitching. Who knew?”

“Yeah,” said Joan, not being sure how to respond otherwise. She looked at Molly’s fingers. Roughened from needlework, but had they always been that way? She was sure no one made Lieutenant by having a very French style of stitching. Still, she doubted Molly was intentionally keeping secrets; probably just playing herself down. She swallowed, and stopped trying to hear Sherlock in her own thoughts.

“So,” Molly said, quite gently, pouring a cup of tea and pushing it towards Joan, “so, you wanted to talk to me.”

“Yeah,” Joan said, rubbing her mouth for a moment, steeling herself, and then meeting Molly’s calm, grave gaze. “I was wondering if you could do something for me, actually.”

“Yes,” said Molly. “Of course.

From her pocket, Joan drew out the letter in its envelope.

“Molly,” she said. “I don’t think you’ve heard everything.”

Molly met her gaze steadily. “I have,” she said, her voice quiet. “I know what she’s been accused of, Joan. Sally’s told me—”

“Sally’s _wrong_.”

“Yes,” said Molly. “Yes, I think so too. What’s that?”

Joan looked down. “It,” she said, “might be her suicide note. Or something like it.”

“Oh God, Joan,” Molly said, and her voice ached. Her hand was on Joan’s wrist and Joan started, looking with shock into her wide, sympathetic eyes. “I—”

Joan pulled her hand away, and pushed the note across the table. “Might be,” she said, her voice hard. “But it might not be, either. I was told she wrote it before going to France. I need you to check the handwriting, the paper, the ink, the envelope—everything. Anything. If it was forged, I need to know. If she’s...hidden something in it, I need to know.”

Even as the words came tumbling out of her mouth she could see pity gathering in Molly’s eyes like storm clouds. Joan’s chest felt scraped and painful, her throat aching. She knew she sounded desperate. But she didn’t take the letter back.

“Okay,” said Molly softly. “Okay.”

“Thank you,” Joan said. 

She didn’t stay for long; couldn’t, in fact, not with Molly’s pity hanging heavy over the table. Still, it didn’t crush her. The fact was that Joan couldn’t, quite, feel like she had been wrong to hand over the letter.

It was a thin, irrational, batsqueak of hope, but it echoed, rebounded, glinted again and again, and when Joan stood up, it was with the feeling of having finally done something. She left the cafe wearing that feeling draped around her shoulders, holding her face up to the day.

Glad as she was to be acting, even uselessly, something about trying to clear Sherlock’s name made her more dead, more disgraced, more gone. Not wanting to go back to Baker Street, Joan walked, dry-eyed and dry-cheeked but with grief digging bloody nails into her heart. Squeezing, pulling.

It was amazing, she thought, having wandered into a dusty fabric shop and started to look about her listlessly, how much could be done despite this hole in her life. (“What is it you’re looking for, Miss?” “Uh, Lieutenant. Recent Lieutenant, actually. It’s, it’s complex. Look, I’ve been granted this allowance for an officer’s uniform…”)

With the address of a tailor in her pocket, Joan drifted on through the city, a ghost in her own life, affecting cover for no reason. The traffic thrummed and quivered like a jumping pulse. Children in a schoolyard shouted rhymes at each other, skipping rope snapping at their ankles. Before her, Joan’s breath crystallised over and over.

Sherlock would have decoded the city for her. “There’s a short-cut through here. Honestly, call yourself a Londoner? Shame about the cafe that used to be here. Best scones this side of Hadrian’s Wall. I imagine the Germans aimed at it specifically to lower morale... Ah, see the woman heading towards us? _Very_ interesting story…” But Sherlock wasn’t there. London was just a pulsing mass of life. Joan lifted her chin and cut through the crowds, unseen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading. Let's have a few notes, 'ey?
> 
>  **"Inter-Service Research Board"** \- I think I've mentioned this moniker for SOE in the notes before, but I do continue to love it for its wonderful lack of any kind of meaning. What is an Inter-Service Research Board? We just don't know. Harding is using it here because he's on the phone, natch.
> 
>  **"but they did say I could stay on"** \- There's kind of a sad lesbian narrative (and a history) of women who have lived together for a long, long time, only to find that when one dies the other has no legal claim on their home or possessions. I'm sure this is actually prevalent amongst queer communities generally, but I've mostly seen it in stories about women (If These Walls Could Talk 2, Cloudburst kind of). It might be something to do with how no queer relationship is presumed in the case of women, because two spinsters can live together more 'normally' than two bachelors. ...I'm rambling now. (Also, you can view Mrs Hudson and Margaret how you like; lbmisscharlie's comment on it was that it was 'ambiguously femslashy', which I like).
> 
>  **"the Natural Science Museum"** \- Some parts of Forgery were indeed based in the Natural Science Museum, which I think is marvellous, and couldn't resist. Other bases included Tangmere Cottage, which was a kind of mad laboratory (and the last port of call for many agents about to fly out from RAF Tangmere) presided over by a man who (according to Leo Marks' autobiography) delighted in making unexpected things explode. Some of the more unusual incendiary devices used by SOE were disguised as coal, dog turds and rats. _Rats_.
> 
> Anyway. To change the subject, I have some unfortunate news. In the last few days I, and my whole social circle, experienced the very shocking and sudden loss of a friend. We're all doing the best we possibly could be under the circumstances, but this on top of some mental health issues I've been dealing with for a while has made everything a little strange and unpredictable to say the least. I will try to get the next chapter out on time (Monday 10th March) but if there's some delay, please do bear with me. I'll try to keep people updated as to chapter timings on my Tumblr, which is reckonedrightly (and as ever, all No Bangs things will be tagged 'no bangs without foreign office approval'). Thank you; writing remains one of the most important things in my life, and the knowledge that other people get pleasure from this and other stories one of the best and most cheering feelings.


	25. 221C.

Joan had rehearsed her argument for the benefit of the Director in front of a mirror. “Sir Carlisle, the situation in France was one of incredible intensity, and analysis from London isn’t going to tell the full story…” Then she had grimaced, turned away from the mirror, and started again, delivering her pitch to the empty room; if she thought too much about her face, her expression would look permanently unnatural. Why was it so hard to make the truth sound truthful?

Joan thought about this as she stood rigid and tight-jawed in front of a secretary’s desk, waiting through a long, papery, administrative pause as the other woman flicked through a leatherbound diary. Before her, as brassy and shiny as her hair, was a nameplate announcing her as Miss Nethercott (Assistant to CD). “No,” she said, at length, looking up. “There’s no mention of a Watson having an appointment with Sir Carlisle, I’m afraid.”

Joan pressed her lips together in a tight line. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You’re sure?”

“Quite, Lieutenant,” said Miss Nethercott (Assistant to CD), closing the diary with a neat, final little thump.

“It’s not under—Mercier?”

“Mercier? No, Lieutenant. Sir Carlisle isn’t in, at any rate.”

“Could I leave a message, then? Or could I take a telephone number?”

Nethercott looked at Joan over the rims of her spectacles, and pushed her lips out and together in a glossy dark pout. Rather than answer Joan’s questions, she inquired delicately—voice lowered as if she were talking about something a little shameful, “Have you got the date wrong, perhaps?”

By her side, Joan’s left hand curled into a fist then slowly and uncomfortably relaxed. “No,” she said, her voice taut and brittle. “No, I haven’t. Major Harding told me that I would be able to see the Director—Sir Carlisle—today, at four o’clo—”

“Major _Har_ ding?” Nethercott’s voice was like a whining see-saw. Bronze curls of hair bounced on her shoulders as she peeled open the diary again and frowned down at it. Joan opened her mouth, breathed deep, her shoulders relaxing and lowering.

“Yes,” she said.

“ _He’s_ got an appointment,” Nethercott began, and behind Joan the door was pushed open. Joan turned, and snapped to attention, shoving her shoulders backwards.

“Sir,” she barked, and Harding braced up in response. Beside him, a tall, rotund man whose bulk strained his expensive suit stopped and frowned down at Joan, his huge, meaty hands frozen before him mid-gesticulation.

“Watson,” Harding said. “Knew you’d be on time. Sir Carlisle, this is Lieutenant Watson—”

“I know who she is, Andrew,” Sir Carlisle Brougham said, dropping his hands and huffing out a disturbed breath, brow furrowing; “what I want to know is what in blazing _hell_ is she doing here?”

Joan’s shoulders were locked tight, her eyes moving from Harding to Brougham. Beside Brougham, Harding looked underfed and rangy; the dark hollows under his eyes and the stubble on his cheeks seemed searingly obvious. When he opened his mouth, it took him a moment to speak. Joan had never seen him pause like that before.

“I told her to come along, sir,” Harding said when he did speak. His voice was restrained. Joan could hear the effort he was going to to fit all his consonants into their proper places, not dropping so much as an ’aitch. “I thought she might add something to the proceedings.”

“Add something! Good God, Andrew. You, Watson—Lieutenant—you were with Holmes in France, were you?”

“I—yes. We—”

“And you saw her get let out of a Gestapo interrogation room?” Brougham asked, striding forwards to Nethercott’s desk, and taking a sheaf of papers she wordlessly held out to him.

Everything was slipping, sliding, moving beyond Joan’s reach. Her breath rattled in her chest and words got stuck somewhere at the back of her mouth. “I didn’t see—”

“But she was captured and released, you attest to that.”

“Yes. She was—”

“You know, of course, that she sent a full confession.”

“She was set up,” Joan said, her voice taut and her hands balled by her sides. “If you let me see it again, I can explain—”

“I hardly think that would be wise. By whom was she set up?”

“Moriarty. One of _your agents_ —”

“None of our agents were called Moriarty, Lieutenant.”

“Who was the woman in those photographs? Her call sign was Navigator, right?”

Brougham glanced at her. Across the room, Harding was still in a way Joan recognised. That was how she went still when things were going wrong.

She swallowed and stared hard into Brougham’s eyes.

“Do you mean Rita Brook? The agent Holmes murdered?” Brougham inquired calmly, and Joan blinked, her mouth wrenched briefly out of shape.

Brougham was looking at her. It was enough. She had lost. Her vision was indistinct; she was remembering that photograph, the one which was blurred and dark with motion, Sherlock’s profile just discernible as a streak of white...

Brougham sighed, and straightened up. “Go home, Lieutenant,” he said. “You’re in no state to argue about this. Later, perhaps—”

“No, sorry, look, I haven’t explained—”

“Lieutenant—”

“Just give me ten minutes,” Joan croaked, “and listen to me—”

“Lieutenant—”

“ _Listen to me_!” Joan yelled into Brougham’s face, spit flecking his cheek.

“Oh!” cried Miss Nethercott, absurdly high-pitched, clapping her hands to her mouth, horrified as if Joan had thrown a punch. There was a single second of dead shock. Then Harding barked, “Lieutenant, _out_! That is a damned _order_!”

His voice cut straight to her muscles and she wheeled about, marching from the room, the only thing stiffer than her back and shoulders the khaki folds of her new officer-class service dress, with its slippery silk stockings and its polished shoes which clicked on the floors as she hurried through the corridors, then banged on the pavement when she stumbled out into the street. The cold bit at her cheeks, her nose. Her breath shuddered in her chest. By her sides, her fingers flexed. Baker Street streamed past in streaks of grey and brown, indiscernible; a bus rattled by, a roaring wall of red; a group of FANYs bustled into view and Joan stumbled amongst them, through them, numb.

“Oh, dear,” said Mrs Hudson at the door, her words far away, as if swept off by the wind howling in Joan’s ears. Joan ignored her for her own good. Her eyes were dry and prickling as she mounted the steps to 221B and forced her key into the lock, wrenching it open. The first thing she saw were two chairs arranged about the fire place, one more than was necessary.

“You did this to me,” she spat in their direction, not knowing whether she was talking to SOE or Sherlock or herself. “You did this. Christ!”

But she was so angry she couldn’t feel it. It was like freezing to death. Wasn’t that what they said? That you stopped feeling it when it got bad enough to kill you? Her key rang out on the floorboards as she hurled it down. And she stood there for a long time, one hand over her eyes, one hand hanging limp by her side, her head slightly bowed, tears trembling at the back of her throat and behind her eyes but never quite spilling out onto her cheeks.

Slowly, she lowered her hand. She stiffened her shoulders. She bent, picked up the key, and walked to the mantelpiece, where she put it down. She turned. Mrs Hudson was standing in the doorway, and as Joan watched, she knocked tentatively against the frame, eyebrows up and mouth scrunched in sympathy. Joan nodded tiredly and turned away to sit down in one of the chairs by the fire, her hands on the arms.

“I’m sorry, dear,” Mrs Hudson said, and Joan closed her eyes.

After a moment, she dragged the words, “I’m fine,” out of herself. Mrs Hudson said something else. Joan said, “Mm.”

“...let him up?” Mrs Hudson inquired. Joan opened her eyes, blinked.

“Sorry?” she asked.

“The Major, Lieutenant,” Mrs Hudson said patiently. “I told him he could wait, it’s not right to bother you, but should I—”

“Major Harding?”

“Yes, dear.”

“I—yes,” Joan said. “Yes. Obviously. Yes.”

Mrs Hudson hesitated, as if perhaps she might have something to say about that—but then just nodded, and hurried off. From below, Joan heard the muted murmur of voices, and closed her eyes for a few seconds, thinking _when he’s here I’ll open them_ —

“Watson,” Harding grunted, and Joan kept her eyes closed as his footsteps vibrated through the floorboards. There was a dull, dusty thump, and she knew he had sat down in the armchair opposite her. Finally she cracked open her eyes.

“Sorry, sir,” she said, sighing and sinking further back into the cushions.

Harding shook his head. “No,” he muttered, gaze drifting away from her as he pushed his teeth tighter together. “My fault.”

“Not really.”

“I should have told you that might happen.”

“It _shouldn’t_ have happened.”

“Well.”

There was silence.

“Aren’t you meant to be talking to him? Brougham, I mean?”

“Not anymore.”

Joan brought her hand halfway to her eyes, but it was pointless; they were searingly dry. She dropped her arm and just stared forwards.

“I hate them,” she said, after a long moment. Her voice was uneven, the words forced out. “I. God. I hate what they’ve done. Sorry.”

“You can apply for another posting,” said Harding.

“No,” said Joan. “No, I can’t. I don’t think I want to.”

Harding opened his mouth, his eyes fixed on some point beyond Joan’s shoulder, and said, “Lieutenant, I—” then stopped himself. He transferred his gaze to Joan’s face, and seemed to come into focus, taking a few moments to fix himself into the present moment. “Right,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

Joan was on her feet before she could think, standing up automatically, though her limbs felt heavy and weary. “Sir?”

“This way,” said Harding, and started clattering down the stairs. Blinking, Joan assumed they were heading out onto the street, perhaps to Harding’s office in F Section HQ—but at the bottom of the stairs, Harding turned, and beckoned her on, deeper into the house, down another flight, into a basement.

“What…” said Joan, finally stirring from her dull indifference long enough to register confusion.

“I thought you might like to know how SOE run these things,” Harding said, very calmly, as he shoved a key in the lock of a door marked 221C. Joan opened her mouth but didn’t question it. The door burst in, and Harding stood back in a way which was as good as an order. Joan stepped in.

The first impression she got was of boxes. Brown paper and cheap crate in thin grey light. It was a storage room. She glanced towards Harding, who nodded. Permission having been granted, she moved towards the nearest box and opened it.

Inside there was the dull, oily gleam of gun metal.

“Oh,” said Joan, dropping her hands. “Oh, bloody hell. You’re kidding me.”

“Weaponry,” Harding said. “Explosives over there, easily enough to bring the house down and maybe some of the neighbours to boot. Here, radios, microphones, maybe even a couple of L pills…”

“Just stacked here?”

“Yes, Watson. Just stacked here.”

They stood in silence, breathing in damp and the smell of things musty with disuse. At her side, Joan’s left hand flexed, unflexed, flexed, unflexed.

Harding’s hand was on her shoulder and she stayed rigid until he took it away, then turned to look him in the eye.

“You’re complicit in this,” Joan said. “In this bloody—recklessness.”

“So are you,” Harding said.

“I know.”

“There’s a difference between loyalty and approval, Watson.”

“Really,” Joan said, looking out at the boxes again. “Is there really.” She didn’t know why she kept staring. Only that it made her think of Sherlock, and all those other dead agents—but especially Sherlock—with their files tossed into basement rooms like this, with their cases ignored and their codes unbroken. VR, VR, VR. Her heart was thudding in her chest.

“Listen,” said Harding, and Joan’s gaze found his. She felt distant, out at sea, her mouth open and her brain swimming. Harding was talking with a quiet, awkward kind of intensity. “The first time I did any kind of undercover work—1920. I was stationed in Ireland. Army intelligence.”

Joan closed her mouth, said nothing—just watched the quake of Harding’s throat, the hard set of his jaw. He carried on, looking slightly to the side, uncomfortable with the speech he was making but apparently grimly determined to see it through. “I was one of eight. There was a problem. Someone sold someone else out, but it was never investigated properly. If you ask me I think we were cut loose by our masters in London. I was the only one who came back.”

Joan knew enough not to say _I’m sorry_. Harding’s face was hard and drawn. He looked like he wanted to say more—like he was bracing himself and gritting his teeth against rebellious words.

“I keep speaking French,” Joan said, the admission bursting from her suddenly, “and seeing her—” The words failed in her mouth. Her jaw was tight. She couldn’t look away from Harding. 

“Yeah,” he said, letting out his breath in a sudden exhale like he was relieved to be able to say something not related to whatever mental stitches his reminisces had pulled loose. “That happens. In crowds.”

“Yeah. And I...I don’t recognise home.”

“No,” Harding said. “No, neither do I.”

After a moment, at some turning of the air, they both stiffened their shoulders, breathed in, flashed uneasy smiles. Joan stepped away, moved towards the door, and then heard Harding talking again.

“Funny thing was that I don’t know the real names of the men I was with,” he said. Joan turned and saw that his face looked once more hollowed-out, scrappy and stubbly. Old, and not dignified. “But I remember their worknames, of course. Timoney, O’Flaherty, Duggan, McCarthy, Carter, Fitzpatrick, Johnson, Russell, O'Brien, Doherty. And me.” Here he laughed, shook his head. “Moran. Sebastian Moran. I didn’t answer to Andrew or Harding for months.”

Funny how his grin was still handsome when it was that angry, Joan thought. She watched it fade all the way, the exhaustion coming like dusk, turning everything greyer and thinner. Funny, how she had been taken in by Harding’s posturing originally. She wondered if she would ever do that—stand as a Captain or something in front of a group of soldiers or, well, military personnel, under her command—and pretend invulnerability, and be convincing. Even with this empty space at her side.

Furious smile fully faded, Harding put his lips together and looked away from Ireland, years ago, to meet Joan’s eyes. “There’s a difference between loyalty and approval,” he said, mouth still graced with the last traces of tired-out mirth. “You have to ask yourself what your disloyalty would achieve.”

Joan looked at him. There was a silence which was a moment too long before she realised Harding was actually waiting for an answer. “Nothing,” she said, her voice cowed and tired.

Harding nodded, gripped her shoulder for a second, and then left the room. Joan trailed in his wake.

“They couldn’t care less, could they,” she said dully, and thought of the bustle of Baker Street, and the empty, dark fields of Vichy France. The searing, worn-to-the-bone exhaustion of life under occupation. Paint peeling from Parisian walls.

“Not for us to say, Watson,” Harding said, stopping in the front hall.

“No,” said Joan. “Sir?”

“Yes?”

“They never trusted her, did they.”

Harding kissed his teeth, and kept Joan fixed within his sights for a long time. “They felt they were taking a chance,” he said.

“Did you trust her?”

Harding sighed, and said,“Something I forgot to give to you,” turning away from the question and reaching to his hip.

“Sir, did you—”

There was the snap, clink and rustle of a buckle being unfastened. “I trust you, Lieutenant,” Harding said shortly, holding out a holstered gun.

Joan looked at it.

“Oh,” she said. “I’d forgotten.”

Harding tch’d. “Bit ungrateful. I’d say giving you this was one of my more tender moments.”

She put her hand out, took it. It was the pistol which Harding had presented to her before she had been dropped into France. Before everything had gone wrong. (“Enjoy yourself,” Sherlock had said.) Joan looked up from it, into Harding’s weather-beaten face. She suddenly remembered the conversation they had had in Beaulieu, after he had mock-interrogated her: she, shivering in her wet pajamas, he, untidy and thoughtful and wry. A rough and slightly embarrassed warmth in every careful gesture. She had said that she couldn’t buy him as German, but could see him as Irish, and he had laughed.

Sebastian Moran, she thought, glancing just once at his large, rough hands; strange, how the revelation that he had a life unknown to her could make her feel so much more akin to him. She met his gaze. “Thank you, sir.”

“My love to Martha,” Harding said, and left. Joan watched the door close behind him, looked to the gun, looked up again. The hallway was still and dark. Oddly oppressive and oddly simple. As if the world had shrunk to a short stretch of grey, boxed air between dim walls, pale ceiling, shabby carpet. 

Joan stroked her thumb against the leather of the holster and thought about Sherlock. About how SOE had decided to take a chance.

She had the strangest sense of calm.

She could do a lot of things with a gun. The thought was oddly-shaped but perhaps not in itself odd. It seemed to follow logically, and she turned it over carefully. It was non-specific, and she had no wish, just now, to hone it. The lack of interest wasn’t due to squeamishness. She simply felt the dark mass of possibilities, and trusted that specifities would evolve. She could let things take their course. All that she cared for was the sudden sense of smooth movement. Since Sherlock had died, she saw now, her days had taken on the strangled, hushed character of the bomber’s held breath before the pin was pulled and the trap set. Now, pin clattering in slow-motion to the ground with an exaggerated ring, she had only to walk in the opposite direction. There was no need to even hope not to get caught in the blast. What happened would happen. Something would happen.

Whatever her plans, she couldn’t keep holding onto it and staring, she supposed. She turned and placed it on the hall table to rub her damp palms against her trouser legs, and then paused, staring at a manila envelope wih her name on it in a familiar hand, full of loops, a hand—she lurched forwards—

_faster than you think like a time pencil can’t trust_

—which usually wrote with a cigarette between its long, nervous fingers, moving rapidly as if it were working a radio key—

_Sherlock took a chance trust you Sherlock please_

—she tore the envelope, and wrenched out the paper inside, let the envelope fall.

Then she lowered the paper, closed her eyes, breathed in deep and let it out, swaying. Yes. Obviously. It was logical that sisters would have similar writing.

Hand trembling, Joan read. Reread. Said, “Jesus,” and threw the letter down on the table, fastened the holster upon her hip, and moved to walk away—then stopped herself. She couldn’t leave it lying about. So she snatched it up and took the stairs with a mechanical fury in every movement, and when she got to the living room she knelt to light a fire, the letter lying beside her. The match sparked, the kindling snapped and spluttered. Joan snatched up the letter and tossed it in. Then she stood and turned her back, feeling the weight of the gun at her hip.

The bloody cheek of the woman, the bloody _indecency_ —to try to use her as a lackey. _Dear Joan, as you seem to be resenting the amount of free time you currently have on your hands, could you please look up certain ISRB personnel files? Mentioning that you’re acting for Mr Bruce-Partington at the desk ought to get you into the archive. I require notes on the PFs of Frederick Hackney and Wilfred Horne; please do bring them to my private residence in Pall Mall, address below. There will be someone to answer the door if I am out._

_Hackney. Horne._

Slowly, Joan raised her head. “Merde,” she said, and dived for the fireplace, then stopped herself. It was a paper trail. It needed to be burnt. But not out of anger. She stared at the paper as it curled, burned, the fire crackling and turning it to ash. She knew Mycroft’s game. Between Hackney and Horne would be Holmes.

* * *

If Molly hadn’t been there, Joan would probably have been caught and hanged, for any number of offences, espionage and carrying an illegal weapon just to start with.

But Molly was there after all. When Joan walked into the tall, blank building which housed the SOE archives, Molly was standing a little away from the desk and fussing with her bag. She caught sight of Joan as she glanced upwards, and Joan saw two emotions flicker over her face: pleasure and then alarm. And then Molly had thrown one arm about Joan’s neck, and was crying, “Oh, how wonderful to see you!” into Joan’s shoulder.

Until she felt Molly’s hand on the holster of her gun, and realised that Molly was nudging her out of the line of sight of the attendant behind the desk, Joan thought it was rather an overreaction.

A weight was released from Joan’s hip; she heard a clunk as Molly dropped the holstered gun into her bag, disguising her movements as fussing, coddling, giggling, always shielding her hands from clear sight with the rest of her body. Only Joan could see the hard lines of tension which pulled Molly’s expression taut; the pinpricks of sweat on her brow. They came into clearer focus as Molly raised her face and stared hard into Joan’s eyes. “What,” she breathed, “do you think you’re _doing_?”

Joan wet her lips. There was no answer, of course; as calm as she had felt setting off from 221B, she had no idea what she was doing. Looking for Sherlock’s records, she could say, but it would only ever sound like looking for Sherlock. “I forgot that was there,” she finally offered.

“Why do you even _have_ a—”

“Molly, Molly please,” Joan said, and Molly fell silent, though her glare was piercing and Joan really did feel guilty, startled, unnerved by her own behaviour; why hadn’t she noticed the gun knocking against her hip? Did it feel that natural? “I didn’t mean to bring it. It’s just, it’s a long story. Can I...you can hold onto it if you’d prefer—”

“I’d very much prefer, thanks ever so much!”

“Right—good—”

“Oh, Joan,” Molly said, and her face crumpled, looking older and more harried in an instant. “I’m so sorry. Can’t I stay with you for a bit—”

“No!” Joan said, far too vehemently, shocking herself, though still her voice didn’t raise above a quiet, non-whispering murmur. Her hands were clammy with sweat, the air between her skin and her clothes uncomfortably damp and hot, and yet she had goosebumps. A dull pain was thudding behind her temples. Molly stared at her and set her jaw.

“We need to talk,” she said.

“Later,” Joan said. “I’m working. I promise. Later. One of the cafes across the road.”

“No,” said Molly, “now,” before carrying out one of the most adept and simple pieces of manipulation Joan had ever seen. She took a few calm steps towards the door, cracked it open—cold, bitter-smelling street air came through with the noise of the road—and then looked over her shoulder, brow creased, at where Joan was stubbornly standing still. Raising her voice so that the receptionist had to hear her, she called, “Come on, silly, you’ve got forever to do that and I’ve only got half an hour for lunch!”

Joan lurched into action, laughing apologetically and coming with her, letting Molly nudge open the door and let her through. The wind whipped their skirts about their knees. A bus rattled and snorted up the road, wheels driving up skiting whitish fans of water from the puddles left by earlier rainfall. Molly was talking and Joan felt wretched. She could lie down, she thought. She could just lose all feeling in her legs and then in everything. Crash down onto the pavement… It wasn’t true. She couldn’t just crash down. That was the whole horror of it.

Damn Sherlock and her talent for unlimited indulgent despair, her ability to ruin herself. Sherlock could have let herself crash. Screamed, spat, sneered, wept; thrown things and swallowed pills. She, Joan, just kept walking beside Molly, staring forwards with her eyes wide and her mouth tight closed.

“Joan?” Molly said.

“Yes,” Joan said, with no intonation.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes.”

“I said my friend is waiting for me in the cafe. Is that alright? I really am on my lunch break. I was just checking up on some archived research, operation reports...anyway, yes, I can tell her to go, of course, I mean we should talk privately, really—”

“I don’t care, Molly,” Joan said heavily. Molly almost certainly replied, but while Joan acknowledged that likelihood she didn’t push the matter any further. The noise of the whole clicking screaming boiling city seemed to be in her ears, and she had no energy to try to strain for anything outside of it. How she hated herself for still being in such a state. People died all the time. She had encountered that fact before.

Inside, the cafe was white and pink, cheerful, faded. Molly sat down at a table with a young Oriental woman in FANY ensign’s uniform. Introductions fluttered through the air. Sue Lynn. No, Soo Lin, something like that, must be. Surname Yao. She was pretty, very, with a soft accent, Chinese occasionally listing to Liverpudlian. “This is Joan...Joan Watson.” The cracked menus were pre-war, Joan noted, or had at least been produced during some earlier, less-rationed time. A number of the items had pen lines drawn through them. The earlier marks had the faded remnants of ‘sorry!’ scribbled by them. Then later whoever was scratching off the items had given up on apologies. Joan was thinking like Sherlock again. How often did most places change their menus, anyway?

“Joan Watson?” Soo Lin said.

Probably only sensible not to change it up too much. Particularly a place like this. Give people what they want. Routine. Framework. Life ordered into neat segments, and marked out by particular types of sandwich, cake, tea.

“ _The_ Joan Watson?”

Joan looked sharply at Soo Lin. “I hope not,” she said. Molly had gone pink.

“Narrator,” said Soo Lin. “You’re quite well-known. In a very secret way.”

Joan pressed her lips together. “So the story’s public knowledge now, is it.”

Soo Lin didn’t look apologetic; just shrugged. “No one else knows your name—”

“I told her,” Molly said, the admission bursting from her. “People have been talking, yes. I told her you were Narrator. But it was relevant, you see—Soo Lin is our expert in—”

“Aging,” Soo Lin said, with great excitement. “Of documents, fabrics, suchlike; wear and tear, believable damage, just old age, it’s all very difficult to fake. You are the Joan Watson whose letter Molly showed me, yes? Because—”

There was a flurry of movement as Molly sat up straighter in alarm and knocked over the milk and cried, “Oh, no, don’t talk about that now,” and Joan said, “The letter, yes, what about it?”, her exhausted nerves suddenly crackling with desperate excitement and mouth open, dry, the thought _please God please God anything, any explanation_ rattling through—not her brain, but her whole body.

“It’s so beautifully aged,” Soo Lin said. “Do you know who did it? It’s really very clever. It almost fooled me.”

The milk pooled and spread, darkening the delicate salmon of the tablecloth to a fleshy, greyish pink. It reached the edge of the table and began to drip onto the floor. An uneven tapping.

“Aged,” Joan said.

“Don’t,” Molly begged.

“ _Aged_ ,” Joan said again.

“I’m sorry,” said Soo Lin. “Yes. I don’t think it was written earlier than this month.”

Slowly, Joan’s knuckles whitened and whitened. She pushed her lips together and bowed her head. _Did you think_. The world was buzzing in her ears. _Did you think it would be anything—?_ “Joan…” Molly. _Did you think it would be anything helpful? Did you think it would mean anything?_

“Aged,” she said, raising her head dazedly. “Alright. Aged. Who, uh, who wrote it?”

Molly stared at the spilt milk. “I don’t know,” she said timidly. “The handwriting is _very_ similar to, to, um. To hers. You know.”

_I was only hoping for a clue. I would have settled for a hidden message. Something trite. I love you, Joan. Did she? I don’t know. She wouldn’t have put it like that. She would have been difficult about it. I wanted something easy._

Joan raised her head. “Easy,” she said.

“What?” Molly almost whispered. Joan turned her stare on her and was strangely gratified to see Molly blink and inch back a little.

“I know,” Joan said, “who has handwriting very like Sherlock’s.”

She pushed herself up, rolled her shoulder back, cricked her neck, and felt herself fitted back into the world. She nodded at Soo Lin. “Thanks for telling me,” she said shortly. “Nice to meet you. Molly, I’ll talk to you later. Drop what you took off me earlier at Baker Street, alright? I don’t think Mrs Hudson will be too shocked.”

“Joan,” Molly said, in pleading tones, but Joan was already intent upon her purpose, half way out of the door, heading for Pall Mall and Mycroft Holmes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my darlings. I've been keeping that one quiet for a while. Or should I say: AHAHAHA I'M NOT SORRY, THIS IS STILL MY FAVOURITE TWIST EVER. Stay tuned: the next chapters are going to be one long shitstorm. And speaking of which, I hope to have the next published on Monday 14th April. Thank you so much for bearing with me, and as ever, for reading.
> 
>  **"Assistant to CD"** \- Much as the head of MI6 is "C", "CD" was the official codename for the Director of SOE.
> 
>  **"Sir Carlisle Brougham"** \- This is a play on Sir Charles Hambro, the historical Director of SOE at the time. I didn't want to use him as a character because obviously here Sir Carlisle comes off as less than great, whereas Hambro seems to have been very canny. This is also the reason that Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, the historical director of F-Section, doesn't show up, and why in-universe the Director of F-Section is kind of implied to be a bit...not interested, leaving Harding, as Deputy Director, to be... _well_. Buckmaster was a master planner and a really interesting character in his own right, and by no means was he a saint, but given what's revealed up above, you understand why I chose to leave him out. (This is the same, actually, with Vera Atkins, who was in charge of F-Section's female agents!)
> 
>  **"I was stationed in Ireland. Army intelligence."** \- Harding could just be implying that he was a member of the [Cairo Gang](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_Gang).


	26. In 1939...

**LONDON**   
**AUGUST 1942**

The summer had laid London to waste with all the ferocity of an air campaign. Was it hotter in France, Sherlock wondered? Her stockings were stuck to the back of her knees with sweat, and the drone of bees and automobiles seemed to stretch and weigh down the already heavy air. When she entered the dull, humid little cafe in which the meeting was scheduled to take place, the sudden silence was like water blocking her ears.

Molly sat at a table out of sight of the windows, yet not conspicuously in a corner. Well-chosen, Sherlock noted, and sat down in front of her.

“Joan’s been sent to France,” she said. “I’ll be following shortly.”

“Hello,” said Molly. “You shouldn’t tell me things like that, Sherlock.”

“You shouldn’t be meeting me.”

“Well.” Molly ducked her head and poured Sherlock a cup of tea. Sherlock watched the ochre liquid splashing up against the insides of the cup with a brief, transfixed interest which she quickly blinked herself away from. There was an uneasy humming tension scraping at the strings of her nerves. It was nothing like the wild electric thrill of fear or anger or sheer excitement; this was low-level and whining. Nervous. “I suppose.”

“Yes,” said Sherlock, and leaned back, not taking the cup of tea Molly pushed towards her. “So why did you agree to this?” She knew very well she was only needling for the sake of proving to herself that she was on the right side of the sharp end. But Molly gave her a hard, worried look, and turned the tactic right back on her:

“What’s wrong?”

Sherlock felt her mouth wrench to one side in an involuntary expression of annoyance, and saw Molly’s brow crease a little in response. That was the problem with Molly—too responsive, reacting to what Sherlock didn’t mean to set in motion. “Nothing,” Sherlock snapped, irritated by her own discomfort. “Why would anything be wrong?”

Molly’s ears had turned pink. “Because,” she said, “Joan’s in France. And—”

“That has _nothing_ to do with it.”

“So there _is_ something?”

“ _Molly_ ,” Sherlock snapped, and Molly looked away, her ears now red and the flush creeping along her neck. She picked up her tea and took an urgent gulp, then looked back at Sherlock, her forehead wrinkled.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that you’re—”

“This isn’t what I came to talk about.”

Molly took another sip of tea, eyes lowered. After she put down her cup she stared pensively at it for a few moments before looking up at Sherlock. “What do you need?” she said.

If only Molly’s gaze weren’t so clear and calm, Sherlock thought, not for the first time. She felt held in place by its transparency. Her own gaze dropped coolly, absently, to the rim of her teacup, more as if dismissive than as if uncomfortable. “Please do try not to overreact,” she said idly, reaching out and taking the cup by the rim rather than the handle.

“What does that mean?”

Sherlock took a sip, put the teacup down with a hard clack and said, “Could you disguise Nembutal as an L-pill, do you think?”

Molly’s eyes went wider than Sherlock had ever seen them go. Her nostrils flared. “Sherlock Holmes,” she said, and Sherlock murmured, “You see, _that’s_ what I meant by—”

She was interrupted by Molly seizing her teacup and upending it over her lap.

Sherlock yelped and sprung to her feet, her chair clattering to the floor behind her as she held her skirt away from her legs. Molly stood up too, one hand against the table and one pointing right at Sherlock. “Don’t you dare,” she said, voice cracking a little. “Don’t you dare be so—”

“For God’s sake!”

There was a hasty clacking of heels as the manageress hurried over as fast as she could, wringing a napkin in her hands. “ _Ladies_!” she said. “Please! This is—this is—”

“I am so sorry,” Molly said.

“Yes, I should damn well _hope_ so,” Sherlock growled, snatching the napkin from the manageress without looking at her and starting to scrub down her skirt.

“I wasn’t talking to you, Sherlock!”

Face white and drawn, the manageress pointed a quivering finger at the door.

Ten minutes later, Molly and Sherlock sat side by side on a bench in a little parched park, empty save for a young mother half-dozing under a tree a few yards away, a book open but unlooked-at in her hand. Her little boy was knocking a tiny toy car against her leg over and over and gaining no reaction from her. Sherlock watched them with a kind of detached interest, until they became just a series of colour changes and movements of light and shadow. The steady bump of the toy car and the movement of the child’s arm. The rise and fall of the woman’s chest. 

The silence, too, moved, lapping at the scene like waves upon a shore. 

Finally, like a sleeper waking, Sherlock’s eyelids fluttered, and she turned her head stiffly in Molly’s direction without going so far as to look at her. “It sounds—bad, I suppose,” she said. “Asking the way I did.”

“Yes,” said Molly. “Yes, it sounds terrible. Actually.”

“I didn’t realise you felt so strongly. About my—health.”

“I’m not blind. I’m not as clever as you but I’m not—I’m not blind. I was there when Sally shouted at you about it. And I know you stopped in Scotland. Didn’t you? Because stopping made you feel sick all the time.”

“Not all the time.”

“You looked awful.”

“Oh, _thank_ you.”

“Sherlock,” Molly said, “I _am_ sorry.” Sherlock said nothing. “But only that I scalded you. Not that I was angry. I’m still angry.”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” said Sherlock. “I need it to function in France—”

“No!”

“But _not how you think_.”

“Then tell me how!”

Sherlock gritted her teeth. Hateful. To have to unravel her own motivations. Say them aloud. Admit to it, this stupid stubbornness like a noose around her neck— “I can’t be forced into anything, Molly,” she spat. “I can’t be separated from it like this. I’ll resent it. This will be easier.”

“You couldn’t take it if you didn’t have it, surely it’s—”

“No, no, it’s not about taking it or not taking it. I’m not going to take it either way. For God’s sake, look—”

Sherlock seized her bag and set it on her lap, shoving a hand inside and rummaging around until her fingers met hard, cylindrical plastic. She pulled out the pill bottle. Shook it. Showed it to Molly, who said nothing.

“I haven’t taken any since we were in Inverness,” Sherlock said. 

“But you carry them around.”

“So that not taking them is always a choice.” This seemed too raw, so Sherlock added, “Obviously,” and was relieved to see flustered annoyance flash across Molly’s face. “Understand? It’s imperative that you do. It’s imperative that I—”

“That you’re in charge,” Molly said for her. She didn’t sound kind. Nor did she sound angry, however. Sherlock closed her mouth, and looked away. The young woman under the tree had finally dropped her book and was now lying on the grass, her fingers light on her little boy’s hair as he pushed his toy car over the gradual incline of her stomach.

After a long time, Molly said, “Disguised as an L-pill?”

Sherlock closed her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. Thank you.”

**LONDON**   
**JANUARY 1943**

The end of Mycroft’s cigar smouldered in the ashtray on her coffee table, smoke curling through the air and diffusing around the living room of Mycroft’s elegant flat. Nothing else in the room moved. Mycroft sat stately and silent in her armchair, her head high and her shoulders down, her knees crossed. Joan was just as still, but it was a tight, tense stillness, her fingernails in her palms, her blood screaming through her veins, her breath even and hard.

“You’re running me,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

Mycroft sighed.

“You’re using me to clear Sherlock’s name. Aren’t you? I’m your agent. Your unconscious agent. Meant to be, anyway.”

“Really.”

“ _Really_.”

Mycroft’s gaze drifted evenly across the room and then met Joan’s, though to call it eye contact would have been excessive. There was nothing behind the grey of Mycroft’s irises but a wall. Joan clenched her fists tighter. She had seen that look on Sherlock’s face. Mycroft was better at it. Where Sherlock might have faltered and somehow redeemed herself through a nervous twitch, an angry sneer, Mycroft allowed nothing; no debris of leftover humanity, no flash of feeling.

“Lieutenant,” Mycroft said. “What on earth do you mean?”

“I mean,” Joan replied, her voice tight and strained, “the note you forged. The unsolved mystery. To get me to look into it. To give me motivation to do your dirty work for you. Don’t say you didn’t do it. I checked. The paper’s aged. The ink’s too fresh. And your handwriting’s just like hers anyway, I know that now.” Her voice was wavering, cracking, raw. “You’ve been dealing a little too long, I think, with Sherlock Holmes, who doesn’t do anything unless she’s curious about it. Who didn’t do anything unless she was—” The words were racking Joan’s chest now, coming too fast and thick. She swallowed, straightened her shoulders, took a lungful of air which seared her throat.

The blankness in Mycroft’s eyes had flickered out. Now her stare had come to a cold point. “You’re blaming me,” she said, “for your interest in clearing my sister’s name? I must say, that seems cold.”

“Cold! I’ll tell you what’s cold, Mycroft, _cold_ is forging a note from your dead sister to—to cattle-prod me into—” Joan broke her stillness, jabbing at the air with a dead-steady finger, “ _cold_ is acting like you do, making up cover for her when she’s barely in the ground, _if_ she’s in the ground—”

Mycroft lifted her chin and said, “ _My sister_ —”

“You _do not_ have a claim on her!” Joan cried.

A second passed like a static shock. Joan felt it through her whole body. Mycroft blinked.

Slowly, her lips parted. “ _I_ ,” she said, with a cool, curdled fury which Joan had the sudden startling sense wasn’t entirely directed at her, “have never tried to lay a claim on her. She was not the kind of woman on whom a claim could ever be laid. I would hope, Lieutenant Watson, that you realise that, close as you were.”

Joan’s mouth was trembling. Her words were clumsy. “You,” she said, “made her—she—carried you around, constantly, you—”

“Do you think I don’t do the same with her?” Mycroft inquired, and Joan shut her mouth tightly. “You knew her, I gather, a matter of months. I—” But here she drew in her breath and herself, solidified once more into impenetrable calm. “I really,” she said, gaze drifting away again, “think it undignified to contest our relative griefs.”

“And I think it’s selfish,” Joan said, “to care about dignity, after— _this_.”

“Yes,” Mycroft said, and her eyelashes fluttered—her hand moved part of the way up to her face, as if getting halfway through a rehearsed movement and then struggling to remember how it should conclude. She dropped it quickly back down to the arm of her chair. “Yes, you would. I’m afraid, Joan, that we are simply—terribly different people.”

“And you misjudged me,” Joan said.

Mycroft looked up. “How?” she said, brow creased and eyes glazed, and Joan’s heart nearly cracked her ribs with how it bloomed then contracted, a horrible convulsion; that look of pale-eyed bewilderment with the very terms of the issue, that look of having stumbled for the first time in a long while, was all Sherlock. Sherlock in the corridors of Wanborough, Sherlock dripping bathwater as she clutched a decoded message telling them to come home, Sherlock muddy-kneed and coming away from kissing Joan on the hill top while the sun burned at her shoulder.

“You thought,” Joan said, “that I would ever, ever need motivation to prove that Sherlock Holmes was innocent. Not just innocent, a—a hero, the—the best woman, the best person I have ever met.”

Mycroft looked at her for a time. “Yes,” she said, voice a quiet rumble, her whole invulnerable figure once more possessed by impregnable calm. “Yes. I misjudged you.” She didn’t sound like she was talking about the same thing Joan was talking about. 

“Do you want to prove that she’s innocent?” Joan asked.

“Naturally.”

Joan focused on her breathing, and stared hard at Mycroft. Funny how only earlier today she had looked at Harding and wondered if she would ever seem that invulnerable. Now her anger seemed to have frozen into a sort of second skin. Impregnable armour. “Good,” she said. “And you were right, you’ll need me for that.” Mycroft opened her mouth and Joan, knowing that the worst thing she could do was to let Mycroft seize on any kind of advantage, snapped, “I’ll be on Platform 2 at Charing Cross for an hour. Meet me there, and we’ll talk about working together. On equal terms.”

Mycroft blinked, raised her chin, said nothing. She looked stunned and distant—momentarily like Sherlock had once looked when faced with the incomprehensible, but Mycroft’s expression sharpened more quickly into one of cold, furious practicality. Joan turned, and walked to the door. Behind her, there was the slow rustle of Mycroft getting up; a low exhalation. Joan stopped, hand on the doorknob, replaying her memories. She turned, looked over her shoulder.

Yes. She had been right. It just hadn’t quite connected with her at first. Mycroft, stretched full length and caught in the light from the window as she reached for a box of cigars on the mantelpiece, was wearing a man’s pinstripe suit, with her hair pinned neatly but unostentatiously behind her head.

Joan opened her mouth, but Mycroft glanced over to her, and Joan knew to turn, to go, to leave that question unasked. The door clicked behind her.

* * *

“I’ll be on Platform 2 at Charing Cross for an hour. Meet me there, and we’ll talk about working together. On equal terms.” The sound of Joan’s voice came up through the floor, audible from the bathroom, mixing with memory.

Against the light of the window, Sherlock’s hand had shaken, the pill trembling between thumb and forefinger. She had thought: _this is the right choice. One hundred percent chance of death versus—ninety-seven percent chance, say? This is the right choice._

She had believed it, but she hadn’t been able to feel it.

She remembered it as she stared into the mirror above Mycroft’s sink but really she always just—remembered it.

Below, the door clicked. Sherlock put down her hairbrush and gripped tight to the sides of the sink. The light in the bathroom was bluish and ghostly. Her reflection looked, fittingly, not quite alive.

_The best woman—the best person—_

Joan had been in the living room below, audible, shouting, alive, blazing: Sherlock’s palms slipped and squeaked on the sink and her head drooped, her shoulders contracting, relaxing. She hauled air into her lungs but it escaped in a high, gasping shudder. Mycroft was below. Smoking, probably. Giving her time.

Sherlock straightened up and stared into her own eyes. Her damp hair was a rat’s nest of tangles, and the smell of dye made the air sharp. The comb lying on the shelf above the sink had blackish stains on it. Doing this now had been a bad idea, but she hadn’t been able to bear being in disguise any longer. In France, after she had woken up dead, she had coloured her hair with bleach, holding her breath against the fumes...her reflection, with its ragged, whitish shock of wilted curls, hadn’t resembled her. She felt as if she had come unanchored from herself.

Footsteps on the stairs now. And now the creak of the door. Sherlock gripped again the sides of the sink, took a long, staggering breath.

Mycroft came in, closed the door carefully behind her. She didn’t speak. Sherlock stared at the plughole as Mycroft took off her jacket, laid it neatly over a chair and picked up a towel, which she then clamped gently over Sherlock’s head and hair, rubbed—she had always hated that. The irritation was so familiar it felt good. The muted ears-blocked quiet, the rasp of flannel on scalp and curls, drying, drying. In their youth, Mycroft had tried uneasily to jolly it along with rub-a-dub-dub and other such nonsense—Sherlock at five years old squirming and fidgeting and asking why the three men were in the tub and Mycroft, a tired twelve-year-old, saying, “Because it’s a very pointless rhyme, Sherlock.” 

Cold air hit Sherlock’s ears and scalp as Mycroft took the towel away and draped it over the side of the bath, then took another—dry—and wrapped it about Sherlock’s shoulders. There was no need. Throughout the mechanical, foul, chilly process of dyeing and developing and rinsing, Sherlock had been in and out of the dressing gown she was currently draped in; it was ruined, dye seeping across the pale gold silk shoulders in long black streaks and unfurling brown blossoms. It was Mycroft’s anyway. Pre-war. Parisian. The fashion house which had produced it had since shut down. What a shame. Mycroft didn’t really care, which was annoying, especially because Sherlock knew it. She had intentionally ruined it anyway. And she didn’t know why. Didn’t know why she kept pushing.

The movement of the comb through Sherlock’s curls wasn’t easy at first but Mycroft was slow, patient, gentle. Sherlock closed her eyes and tried to do anything but think of Joan. A weight was lifted from her neck; she lowered her head, and allowed Mycroft to twist and pin her wet hair at the nape of her neck.

“I suppose you heard,” said Mycroft. Sherlock opened her eyes.

Yes. Every word. Not just Joan, but Mycroft too, talking about carrying Sherlock about with her. Sherlock’s knuckles were white on the sink. She breathed out slowly and straightened up, opened her mouth to say what time is it? but:

“It’s fourteen minutes to two,” Mycroft said. “Get dressed and go.”

“Yes,” Sherlock said, very quietly.

“Sherlock—”

“Don’t tell me to be careful, sister dear.”

“I was going to wish you good luck. Sister.” An awkward, emphasised: “Dear.”

* * *

There was a certain rhythm to clandestine meetings, Joan thought, shaking out her paper and rereading a sentence as people milled about her on the platform. The lull; the uneasy jumps of expectation; the growing conviction that your contact wouldn't show and then the recovery when they finally did. At the moment, she was in the lull, but her neck was prickling and her calm was underpinned by a distant hum of anxiety. Distant because she knew she was feeling it, but couldn't quite feel it happening to _her_.

A woman crossed Joan’s field of view, dark-suited and wide-hipped; Joan glanced upwards, but it wasn’t Mycroft, wasn’t anyone she knew, and so she looked back at the paper. She had pulled out the sports section and dropped it on the bench beside her to discourage anyone from sitting there. The news wasn’t all about the war, but it predominated. Joan’s gaze kept landing on stories of patriotic heroism. Posthumous medal. Proud parents will remember. Grave injuries. Finally claimed the life of. Somebody's Sherlock dying every minute.

The language of glory was repetetive. Joan turned the page and read through a Lord’s speech on the importance of education instead.

In spite of all of it, she felt good. Tired, but good. With a way forward. If only Mycroft would come. Joan knew she shouldn't have walked off, but she couldn't have stayed in that sitting room any longer with Mycroft staring at her and getting her wrong, and twenty-five years of family misery making the very air heavy. Anyway, she liked the idea of making Mycroft get out and _walk_.

Had Sherlock and Mycroft ever gotten along? Frightening thought, really. Joan's lips quirked up as she continued to scan the page, picking up only occasional splinters of phrases. _Vital to the strength of our Nation_ , things like that. A figure was approaching, just a dark shape in Joan's peripheral vision. Female, she judged from the figure's gait, but not so tall nor so stately as Mycroft. Imagine Sherlock and Mycroft as children, though, God, that was a thought and a half. Joan tried to collect the litter of her childhood memories and transpose them onto theirs. Skipping games in the street? No, of course not. They wouldn't have mixed with other children; Joan had the vague feeling that people that posh just didn't. Anyway, Sherlock had said Surrey and implied stately home, which meant no street to play on, class and money be damned. So what had they done? Read, Joan hazarded. Played chess, perhaps. Games. God, yes, they would have loved that, brows furrowed in juvenile frowns, shooting infantile sharp smirks across a chessboard, a draughtsboard—anything, a pack of cards, anything. But while Mycroft would have been content with such warm, dry occupations, Sherlock would have wanted to ramble. “Sorry, that seat’s taken,” Joan said as the woman who had just come closer dropped her bag onto the bench beside her, crumpling the sports section underneath—bloody rude. Sherlock would have been wild, yes, the sort of kid who ruined her nice dresses and had constant grubby knees and palms and ears. Even now, she couldn't keep her fingernails clean. That is, she hadn't been able to keep her fingernails clean. When she was alive.

“I know,” said Sherlock.

The paper made a sound like the flutter of birds’ wings as it fell from Joan’s hands, onto her lap, slid to the ground. Sherlock bent, picked it up, and held it out.

She was thinner, paler, her hair tied back. Or perhaps she had looked that way when Joan had been with her in France and eighteen days missing her had been enough to idealise her, fix her forever in Inverness, where she had filled out her uniform until she looked almost healthy. Still, she didn’t look weak, for all she might look ill. Something about the emaciation of her face only made her look harder.

All of this was pointless, of course. She was dead.

“No,” Joan said. 

“Hello, Joan,” said Sherlock. 

Her voice was the thrum of a distant memory. 

“I’m, no,” Joan said. “Seeing things. Am I?”

“Only what’s in front of you,” said Sherlock, her expression not changing. “Take your paper, we’re beginning to look odd.”

Joan grabbed the paper and threw it down onto the seat, standing up and finding, yes, she still came up to Sherlock’s nose: Sherlock still smelt of cigarettes, as well as, now, the searing chemical scent of hair dye. Her eyes tracked the slightly-too-dark tint of her hair, the gleam of Vaseline not quite wiped from her forehead, to keep the dye from staining her skin. Joan’s breath was burning in her chest.

Some traitorous, inhuman impulse towards spycraft had snaked up from a well-trained place inside her and clamped down on her brain. Her self-control was rigid as iron, and for that she thought she might never forgive herself. But even her shoulders were relaxed. Her face was neutral.

Her voice was tight and quivering, though, as she said, “I get it,” in a low, manic tone. “Brilliant, Sherlock. I get it. Isolate the mark in a public place so they can’t react dangerously without blowing their own cover.”

Sherlock (Sherlock, there, just _standing there_ ) blinked, a shuttering, shuddering movement. Other than that, no change. “Well,” she said after a beat, leaning back and lacing her hands behind her back. “Give me some credit, I am a professional.”

Joan punched her partly because she wanted, for once, not to be the perfect spy.

Sherlock went reeling back, crashed into a woman behind her, but wasn’t floored, and Joan saw the moment when Fairbanks’ training clicked into place and overthrew Sherlock’s own instincts. The next thing she saw was black. Pain exploding across the right side of her face. And then her knuckles slammed into Sherlock’s stomach.

Suddenly the world filtered in again, with all attending horror and fascination from bystanders—women clamping gloved hands across their mouths or children to their sides, men looking like they’d had the earth pulled from under them, disgusted and bewildered. Sherlock staggered back, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and spat out pinkish saliva onto the platform. She raised one of her hands to the transport policeman poised to drag them away from each other; the other was half-draped over Joan’s shoulders and half gripping the fabric at the back of her tunic. It wasn’t a friendly kind of grip. Joan had a similarly vicious hold on Sherlock’s arm.

They panted in tandem for a few moments, and then the policeman grabbed Sherlock’s arm, wrenching them apart. “Family thing,” Sherlock gasped, releasing her grip. Joan staggered, furious but gasping, bereft at the sudden loss of contact. Somehow the thought _she could leave again_ passed across her brain. “My ’alf-sister—”

Joan caught onto the dropped H with a fresh spurt of anger which knocked her desperation out of her for a few seconds. Yes, of course, more normal for two girls from the East End to set into each other—but Sherlock was right, was the thing, the conductor would accept that more easily. Bastard, and how could she— “You shouldn’t’ve got your claws into him,” she improvised, shoving Sherlock away, the feeling of her—solid but thin-boned—warm—bursting through her nerves like an electric shock. “And then—”

“Not _my_ bloody fault,” Sherlock snarled, staggering.

“ _You broke his heart_ —”

“Ladies! Get out, or you can explain this down the station!”

Hands at the backs of their clothes. Slipping over tiles as the policeman walked too fast for Joan’s staggering feet and trembling knees. They were marched out, expelled onto the street, warned, and Joan’s blood hadn’t stopped pounding. The world was rushing in her ears like an oncoming train, the crowd of people on the street blurring. Unintelligible. Everything was too bright and too absurd to be real, and there was Sherlock, split-lipped and looking as wild as ever she had, looking like Joan’s most desperate fantasy, her hair escaping the bun at the back of her neck in wisps and corkscrews the colour of storm clouds.

Around them, the world moved. And Joan realised that no one else could see what Sherlock had done.

“Do you—know,” Joan said with effort, “you're meant to be dead?”

Sherlock cast her a look which tried to be filthy but stumbled somewhere, and Joan’s heart threw itself vainly against the bars of her ribs. Joan set her jaw harder. “Of course I know I'm meant to be dead,” Sherlock muttered, glancing away and turning up the collar of her coat. It wasn’t the WAAF greatcoat, but the movement was familiar. A shock to the heart. Memory made flesh.

“Right,” Joan said. “Of course you do, _of course you do_. Sherlock, why. Why are you—why—”

“I need a favour,” Sherlock said. Joan jerked as if a current had just passed through her. Sherlock's face was cool, frank, calm save for those spasms of the mouth, those traitorous blinks. Joan knew she should care more for them but she couldn't. Couldn't. A favour.

“A favour.”

“A favour, yes,” Sherlock said, eagerly, and Joan said, “No. Stop. Stop or leave. Stop or walk away, walk back to your sister’s flat.”

When Sherlock stilled she looked as if she had never breathed. As usual. That penetrating, unnatural stillness. Perhaps that was what the Holmes sisters had spent their early days practicing; sitting still in Surrey. Joan could feel everything dropping away. Just falling. She breathed in deep and tried to anchor herself to the world but the world no longer made sense, if it ever had without Sherlock.

“You have been dead,” she said, “for eighteen days. Sherlock. That. Is a long time to be dead. Especially when at the end of eighteen days you stop doing it. You—”

“I'm glad to see you,” Sherlock blurted with a kind of rote panic, eyes widening minutely and the barest hint of question in her voice. Rage crashed through Joan's chest and she saw Sherlock undergo another of those cataclysmic shuddering blinks, a tiny movement which disturbed her entire face.

“Don't,” Joan spat in her most private undertone, “don't you dare say what you think is the right thing. There is no right thing, Sherlock. There is _no_ —” her voice was ragged, her throat crammed; was she about to cry? Why would she cry? Wasn’t she supposed to be glad? Sherlock was alive—alive, alive, alive!

“I need you to help me,” said Sherlock, and this time her voice splintered.

Joan staggered back and slumped against the outer wall of the station, clamped her hand over her forehead. The pavement was vibrating with the clatter of busy feet, the drone of buses and automobiles. The city was ticking on, lurching and stumbling on, and it hadn’t noticed Sherlock. They were just two women having an argument. No one knew.

Grief. Grief like torn fabric. Grief which couldn’t be inflicted on the world. This loss in the bones. The helpless confusion of it. The animal horror, and the all-too-human awareness of the sickening weightlessness of life. It hadn’t gone away.

Gradually, gradually, she turned her face to Sherlock's and met her gaze. “What,” she said. “What do you want.”

* * *

They ended up in Mycroft's Pall Mall flat. Mycroft was nowhere to be seen. Even her ashtray had been emptied of cigar ends.

Sherlock paced from one end of the study to another, hips zig-zagging in ferocious rhythm and face drawn taut, as she flicked cigarette ash onto the carpet and smoked cigarette after cigarette. Joan sat on the sofa because she had staggered as soon as she had gotten in the door, and nearly slid to the floor, except Sherlock had caught her about the waist.

She carried the imprint of Sherlock'slong, hot hand on her skin. She could barely think beyond it.

“Harding,” she said dully.

She was exhausted, she thought, quite detachedly. The grief in her had turned leaden. It was a heaviness now, not a howl. She closed her eyes.

 _“It’s Harding,”_ Sherlock had said. _“Harding knew what Moriarty was doing.”_ And Joan had said, _“What?” “He knew.” “Who did you say?” “Harding.” “What?”_

“Yes,” said Sherlock. “Obvious, really. The messages Moriarty transmitted, ostensibly sent from Corentin, used Corentin's particular code for French landing sites.”

“Yes.”

“Who else knew them? Harding told us himself. Only him.”

“But she could have done anything to Corentin. She could have—”

—it all seemed so unreal here, in England, with Sherlock— _Sherlock_ —pacing back and forth, enough to wrench Joan's insides beyond tears or coherent feeling—

She put her elbow on the arm of the sofa and her head on her hand. She screwed up her eyes. “No,” Sherlock said, her voice rippling through the dark behind Joan’s eyelids. “It doesn't make sense. Haven't you been keeping up? She made Corentin take his own life. That was the most she could do. And for a man like that, that's an enormous step below betraying his cover and his country.”

“But she could have—”

“Of course she could have, but she didn't,” Sherlock snapped, then paused. Joan cracked open her stinging eyes and saw Sherlock staring at her.“Obviously, Moriarty cut him loose.”

“What?”

“Moriarty knew I would realise only Harding knew the code.”

“So?”

“So what if Harding knows that? He’ll be feeling betrayed, I’m sure. Desperate. Confused. Prone to making mistakes. But he’ll want to silence me, whatever else, if he finds out I’m alive.”

 _I don’t recognise home_ , Joan had said. Harding’s voice echoed through her: _neither do I_. Her breath caught. “No. Sherlock—Sherlock, this is insane—”

“Joan—”

“ _You’re_ insane!” Joan cried suddenly, sitting up straight and slamming her hand down on the arm of the sofa. Sherlock’s expression crystallised, all feeling leaving her eyes. “Harding? I know you’ve never liked him, Sherlock, but he’s—a good man, he’s not—”

“I thought—”

“—he’s been _here_ , he’s been _right here_ , unlike—”

“—I was the best person you’d ever met?”

They stared at each other, separated by two meters and the whole expanse of France, a faked death, a possible traitor. Sherlock’s mouth underwent a series of tiny compressions. Joan’s left hand slowly closed into a fist.

“Prove it to me,” she said, her voice raw and hoarse.

“I,” Sherlock began, and Joan interrupted her, holding up a hand.

“Start from the beginning,” she said. “Tell me the story. How it all happened. Come to this, this theory, when it’s right. I don’t know what happened, Sherlock.”

“I—”

“And Sherlock?”

“Yes?”

“The whole thing. The whole damn thing. If you ever lie to me again—”

“I didn’t—”

“Yes. You did.”

Sherlock licked her lips. Pale pink, with a vertical strip of red over the lower.

She said, “Alright.” And she said, “1939, then.”

“The war started.”

“Yes. And—unrelatedly, I tried to kill myself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof! Sorry that was a day late; I continue to come apart at the seams. The next chapter should be, er, on or around 28th Monday. And it's a wham episode. Thanks for reading, as ever! No notes for this chapter, as it's mostly people being upset, which is fairly appropriate in any era. 
> 
> (Also YAY I MISSED WRITING SHERLOCK :>)


	27. The Empty House.

“Back,” said Harding.

“Yes sir,” said Joan, standing rigid and straightbacked, her left hand working at her side, flexing stiffly in and out of a fist. “Back.”

“From the dead, Watson?”

“Just from France. Apparently.”

“Any proof?”

Joan's gaze moved to Harding, not quickly but with a magnetic inevitability. She saw the quirk of Harding's expression. Yes, of course. As his agent, Joan was the proof. Her intelligence was the only intelligence on offer, and its proof of quality was the standard of her work and the trust placed in her. You didn't ask someone transmitting from France for proof, not unless you suspected they weren't them, or were captured and coding under duress, and even then, you didn't want to tip off whoever was reading the messages that _you knew they knew_.

In. Out. In. Out. Joan saw Harding's eyes drop from her face and linger on her hand for a few seconds.

“Right,” he said. “ _Back_.”

Joan had told him the story, leaving out Mycroft, who made things too complicated. Received word of a clandestine meeting in Charing Cross Station. Assumed SOE-mandated. Went to station. Met by one Assistant Section Officer Sherlock Holmes. And then what, Harding had asked? “An altercation occurred,” Joan had said stolidly, staring blank-eyed at the wall.

The half-surgical half-mythical jargon of spies had come into being out of a need for ordinary words for extraordinary things, and so when it was pieced out into operational phrases the story didn't seem unbelievable. Startling, yes. But appropriate, somehow. It had the rowdy glamour of the stories which had gone around the training camps, which had circulated in France: Marie cycling half the length of France; the man in Paris who gambled with SS and whose dangerous cover was that of a black market dealer willing to give German soldiers the best cut of what he had; and the traitor who came back from the dead. But this was different, of course. Sherlock was working against SOE. Come back from the dead with an agent's blood on her hands. Sherlock would be a horror storry, a black and bitter laugh from a tutor at Wanborough, forgotten through vilification.

“How?” was all Harding said.

Joan swallowed. “Nembutal disguised as an L-Pill.”

“The stuff she took to knock herself out?”

“Yes.”

“So she was unconscious while our agent confirmed her dead?”

“Apparently.” That jerked some string inside Joan's head, and she said, very stupidly, “ _Our_ agent.” The moment it was out of her mouth she knew it was a stupid thing to say. Of course it had been someone associated with SOE who had taken the pictures and attended the scene; SOE had the photos and the information. She just hadn't thought—somehow—that any one who photographed Sherlock's suicide could be—on the right side.

Harding looked at her with a brief flicker of surprise and then sighed. “Sit down, Watson.”

Joan sat, feeling numb and ill and bracing herself not to let it show. Because Lieutenant Joan Watson did do that sort of thing, didn't she? —not all that comfortable, how acting yourself made you aware of how you acted _all the time_. Her throat kept contracting. Her left hand was twitching more than clenching now.

“The scene was never spelt out for you, was it?” Harding said. “Knight and Navigator, Reine and Georgette, Victoire and Virginie—” He raised a hand carelessly, let it drop. “Sherlock Holmes and Rita Brook.” The names struck Joan like minor electric shocks. “We'll call them that.”

“Alright.”

“They're in the safehouse you described leaving approximately an hour before Brook arrived. The conversation's well underway. Holmes has sent her message. Her confession.”

“Yes.”

“In the building across the street is a photographer. Brook had to lobby hard for him.”

“Lobby who?”

“London. And not our London, put it that way. This photographer is an SIS agent. That's Secret Intelligence Service. The Bastards of Broadway, as we know them. He's a double. Workname Reichenbach.”

Joan’s lips contracted slightly. “He's undercover with the Germans.”

“If you like. That was how Brook managed to get him into position. He was in a DF van and picked up Holmes' signals, immediately contacted Brook—”

“How?”

“We don't yet know. Probably they were aware of the location of Holmes' safehouse prior to the event, and had an established code to indicate that they should take up positions there. Potentially Brook was even with him—”

“In a DF van? Just casually in the passenger seat at the right moment, you mean?”

“You forget Holmes had cleared out of her original location, had probably alerted her German contacts of the change in her circumstance. All telltale signs. Brook must have been on red alert. Holmes certainly was—”

 _And so she recruited you as her unconscious agent, fed you a story about an agent called Moriarty who sat at the centre of a quivering web of spycraft and never came out in the open_ —Harding didn’t say. He closed his mouth on the words. They shimmered in the air anyway, and Joan gritted her teeth together right at the back, raising her chin and staring at Harding with as much cool force as she could muster. Harding didn’t rise, just sniffed forcefully and leant back, mouth grimly set.

“Brook wasn't forthcoming about her operation,” Harding said. “Don't look like that. Neither was Holmes. Neither were you. Agents in France, as a rule, don't tell us how they're doing their job. Mostly because they know that a great deal of it wouldn't necessarily be looked upon favourably by certain people back home.”

“Reichenbach. Was he infiltrated or turned?” Joan asked. Harding licked his lips and kissed his teeth with a hard clicking sound, a grimace like he’d tasted something foul.

“I know what you're thinking,” he said. “And Watson, it doesn't make any damn difference. Whether he was German or English, whether he ever believed in National Socialism, whatever his reasons are for doing the work he does, it's irrelevant. An Englishman can be just as untrustworthy as a German.”

“As untrustworthy as a German who's gone back on his country?” Joan asked, because of course the photographer had been German. There would be no way to infiltrate a foreign agent that completely. “Who once believed in it enough to be in the SS?”

“You think that's the only reason people join the SS, Watson? You think betrayal comes down to belief?” Harding said, and finally his voice had an edge to it. “You think the power of it doesn't matter at all, you think people don't want to move up in the world at any cost? And do you think this hasn't been analysed already, all of these different factors, while we try to work out what happened? Do you think I _personally_ haven't been looking at the facts?”

She looked away, her throat seizing tight, fists clenched for just one moment, and said, “Do you think I don't know all of that—”

Breathed in. A cold gasp. Lowered her shoulders. Turned her head back. Fixed Harding in her sights. “Sir,” she said dully. “Do you think I want to—I know. I _know_.”

She breathed in. It was a matter of shuffling the cards of her thoughts. A magic trick; a sleight of hand. Getting the right one to the top. And is this the one you chose, sir? Yes. Yes, it is.

A murderer, Sherlock, a murderer: Sherlock, who had never been quite right, who was a genius but never quite clever enough to come out on top, who had decided to prove her own brilliance by exposing a plot in Occupied France. Except there had never been a plot to expose, so Sherlock had had to create one, at the expense of her own loyalty. She had done it beautifully, of course; there was a stunning verve in it, a biting cleverness. Sherlock had cracked codes, followed invisible footsteps, walked down the wrong path with her head held high and excitement in her eyes. And then she had shot Rita Brook twice in the head. A black explosion of blood moving too fast for the camera to catch clearly. A smear of motion. But Sherlock’s face in perfect clarity. Hard. Sharp-eyed. Gun in her hand.

Her return was nothing but proof of how she had planned ahead.

Harding’s face was deep-lined, weary. There was a set to his mouth which was almost pained. “I’m sorry, Watson,” he said.

Joan sucked in her breath, let it out slowly. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what she’s done, exactly.”

“We’re still not sure of the extent of the damage her presence caused. The aftermath’s been serious.”

Joan opened her mouth, closed it, and nodded in a way which was more of a shudder.

“After Holmes’ death—after what happened, we think the Germans got startled and rolled up the entire network. Professor is missing, presumed arrested. Intelligence suggests that Scientist was killed during an attempt at capture, and that three of the Resistance agents he ran are being held for interrogation.”

“Mme Cammaerts?”

“No further information,” Harding said, and Joan thought of the hunched, stubborn shape of the old woman in the corner of her overheated parlour and felt the world tip slightly. Her world had shrunk to London and Sherlock’s absence, she realised, feeling sick. She had forgotten the people she had left behind. 

“That’s two people dead,” Harding said, “and four, maybe five people captured, any of whom could talk and cause the arrest of more operatives in France. Do you know what happens to people convicted of espionage when they’re deported to—”

“Yes,” Joan said. They had been told. Early on. When it hadn’t seemed so close or so real. Harding knew she knew. “Worked to death.”

“She caused that, Watson.”

Joan closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, there was Harding still, leaning back in his chair with his hand at his mouth and the light coming through the window to his left painting ripples and triangles of brighter khaki across the sleeve of his tunic. As Joan watched, he rubbed his forefinger over his moustache—once, twice, three times—and dropped his hand. Joan said, “I know, sir,” in a voice that staggered but didn’t fatally falter.

It was late evening. Rain was starting to splatter on the windows, casting dappled shadows across the room. The smack of water against glass was the only sound, aside from the tick, tick of the clock. 

“Assuming she’s back in London,” he said, his voice lowered and calm, “did she say what happened when she woke up?”

“No. I didn’t ask. I was a little—distracted.”

“Ha.”

Joan searched his face for a clue. “You’ve got a theory.”

Harding huffed out air, kissed his teeth again. “No,” he said. “I know what happened. She was knocked out, and the SIS man reported to the Gestapo that their agent was dead, told them to steer clear from the scene lest they reveal their involvement too quickly and make a complicated situation out of what could be a very simple case of rolling up an unsuspecting network. Focus on the remaining SOE agents and leave the clean-up to him.”

“He was in the room? And he didn’t notice—”

“Ensign Donovan,” Harding said, “came to report Holmes’ drug use when she found her passed out in her dorm in Wanborough. She said she was barely breathing. That she looked dead.” He exhaled. “Reichenbach walked off, assuming the police would get to it in time. Best not to claim Holmes or Brook as anything relevant to the Gestapo.”

“And then…”

“And then somewhere in between the Gestapo and the police, Holmes scrambled up from the dead and started to run.”

“Christ,” Joan said, scrubbing her hair off her forehead. “No. Something’s wrong, he would have checked her pulse—”

“How the _hell_ would I know, Watson?” Harding roared, and Joan froze.

The silence stretched like a sheet over a corpse, undisturbed by breath. Harding rubbed his moustache with his fingertips, then drew his knuckles over it, a variation on the gesture which Joan had never seen before.

Her throat clicked with clearing before she murmured, eyes not focused on Harding, “I didn’t think.”

“That she was going to come back from the dead?”

“I didn’t think about Brook,” Joan said, her gaze drifting uncertainly to Harding’s face, which was drawn tight. In the dull, rain-thick light spilling through the window, his skin looked sallow and his russet hair darker than usual.

Slowly, his jaw moved, as if he were chewing on the thought. His gaze was angled coolly away. Then something of a subdued wince came over him, visible only in the slightest deepening of the lines about his eyes, a slight thinning of the lips. “Didn’t think,” he said, looking back at Joan, “it would be—a good idea to talk about Brook with you.”

“You knew her. You trained her.”

“Yes,” Harding said, sighing and leaning further back in his chair. “Least it wasn’t a surprise. You always expect the worst when an agent goes to France.”

“Yes.”

“And who’s got time to mourn anyone in a war?”

“Exactly the problem.”

“Exactly the problem,” Harding said, with a rough sort of humour, “from the exact opposite side.”

Joan laughed, a sort of ugly bark of a sound which caught in her throat. “Because I’m trying to miss the murderer and you’re…”

“Trying to miss the woman the murderer didn’t miss,” Harding said, but the joke was a flint of humour too far and Joan flinched, grimaced, curled her fingers into fists again.

“Christ,” she said, very softly. Harding nodded, and they fell silent again.

After a long moment, Joan said quietly, “What was she like?”

Harding looked at her with some surprise. “Like,” he said, as if he had never heard the word before. Joan looked back at him, shrugged.

He drummed his fingers on the tabletop once. “She was clever,” he said, in the uncertain and uncomfortable tones of a man clumsily pinning descriptors on something which held some particular flavour in his mind, knowing he was doing badly. “Mathematical. Sharp. I don’t mean sharp as in just bright, I mean sharp as in she walked into a room and the room near enough ripped down the centre.” He sniffed, apparently disgruntled by his own analogy. “Good woman. Good spy. Very young. Just a girl, really. Very—witty. Irish, you know.”

The woman in the pictures—Rita Brook, Moriarty, Navigator—had been wanly pretty, dark-haired and pale, little but not quite delicate. A heart-shaped face. An oddly voluptuous mouth. Innocent eyebrows. Huge eyes. She hadn’t had any of Sherlock’s aggressive, almost morbid, almost vulgar loveliness. Nor had she looked especially singular. Her face could have been anyone’s face. Joan thought, anyway. But Harding said, “She wasn’t much like anything.”

Joan hesitated, and then nodded. Just once. She couldn’t have described Sherlock on demand.

A lie. She could have said: murderer, murderer, murderer. 

The word quivered in her throat, wound around her memories of Sherlock’s hands. Mouth. Voice. Laugh. Laugh of a murderer. Murderess. A foolish, violent, red word, _murderess_. It carried with it a melodramatic tableau—a Victorian woman in a crimson dress raising the knife behind her husband’s back, a look of wild frenzy on her face, ready to plunge the blade right between his shoulderblades, to darken the pristine black of his dinner jacket with spurts of stage blood. The word murderess was nowhere in the pictures Joan had seen, with their birdwing smears of rippling black, the blood and the shadows and Sherlock’s hair all coming out nearly the same colour.

She closed her eyes. Rita Brook had been sharp, as in she walked into a room and the room near enough ripped down the centre. Then she had met someone sharper, who had done the same to her. And Joan felt angry, that was the thick, strangling feeling in her chest—that was it, angry, betrayed—Sherlock had betrayed—

“Watson,” Harding said.

—her. Joan lifted her eyes, composed her face.

“Sir,” she said, but Harding raised a hand, stopped her.

His voice was very gentle as he said, “I’m not going to ask you to tell me. Just say yes or no.” Joan’s throat convulsed, fine tremors shuddering through her like electricity. “Do you know where she is now?”

Joan closed her eyes. “No,” she said, opening them, her voice heavy with dead loyalty. Harding’s face didn’t move. There was a pause of two seconds. Then Joan said, “I know...where she will be. Tonight.”

The sudden relaxation in Harding’s face was mingled with gratitude and a kind of painful reluctance.

Still, he moved with a practiced calm, opening a drawer in his desk and taking out a notepad, which he pushed along to Joan. Then he handed her a pen. Explained to her that often, people found these things easier to write than to say, and a written account would be more coherent in any case. But in the end, after making a few hesitant marks on the page, Joan put down the pen, and said, “No, if I’m going to—I’ll tell you,” and told him. Told him everything. Told him the location: Sherrinford House, where Sherlock had grown up. Told him the time: twelve minutes past midnight. Told him the signal: a glow coming from the drawing room, a fire lit, a blackout curtain left slightly open. Told him the front door would be open.

When she was finished, Harding didn’t say thank you. She was glad of it. Instead he nodded, and she knew she could go. She stood, and made her way to the door. Gripping the handle, however, she paused, and looked over her shoulder. Harding sat broad and immovable behind his desk, watching her. Joan asked, “Was there a funeral? For Rita Brook?”

Harding smiled unhappily. “Yes. She was in an accident,” he said. “Signalling work. In Malta.”

* * *

Mrs Hudson wasn’t in when Joan returned. This was a relief. Spared hassle of disguising or explaining what she was doing, she was able to pick the lock to 221C with a cool, easy swiftness.

She stepped inside, took what she needed and brought it upstairs. After she had locked the living room door, she loaded her spoils into a plain black cloth bag. Two torches; two pistols; three explosive caps; a time pencil. And the recording microphone. She had hesitated over that. But now the decision was made and so she was calm about it. She left the bag on the sofa as she went up to her bedroom to change out of her uniform and into civvies. “Don’t wear all black,” Sherlock had said. “We’re not Germans, and nor are we advertising ourselves as suspicious individuals.” So Joan wore dark grey trousers and her boots, and threw her battered leather jacket over a deep blackish-green shirt, thinking: it’s lucky my wardrobe can be easily adapted to crime. Then she went up to the bathroom of 221B, where two towels were slung over the side of the bath. One white. One red. She picked up the red towel and held it under the tap. Then she wrung water out of it so that it spattered against the white ceramic. Her knuckles whitened, reddened, her hands chilly. Finally she brought the towel into the living room, opened the window and tossed it over the pane, half in and half out, to dry in the breeze.

(In the code they had knocked up between them in Mycroft's Pall Mall flat, the sign meant: “You were right, Sherlock. And fine, I'll do it.”)

* * *

“Get to Stratford by half ten. The car will be on Odessa Road, the upper end,” Sherlock had said. “I’ll be there already. The driver will be supplied—by my sister, and on her insistence.”

“You’ve already asked her?”

Sherlock had snorted. “Why would I have to ask her to know? Just try not to be followed, and remember the equipment.”

Joan had nodded, following the words of a ghost.

* * *

Now they were in motion. A life spent moving to and from Surrey, Sherlock thought, looking out of the car window as the city blackout smudged and darkened to pure countryside black. She could feel Joan breathing beside her, as people who live by the sea suddenly remember the sound of the waves on the beach and then find they can't forget it until they forget to try forgetting it. The slow, easy filling of lungs. Yes, easy. Joan was calm, in that hard, operational way of hers. Sherlock closed her eyes.

They hadn't spoken. That was, Sherlock had said, “Have you got everything?” and Joan had said, “Yes. Here's your pistol.” Then Sherlock had said, “And you're clear on—” “Yes.”

The driver had said nothing, of course, which was predictable. She was one of Mycroft's inexhaustible supply of elegant, practical ladies, always presenting themselves with such good taste that they were barely visible.

“Looking forward to seeing your house,” Joan said suddenly, smashing the silence with such suddenness that Sherlock blinked, her shoulders tensing. Then her lip twitched, not entirely happily.

“It's not the best time for it,” she said, still looking out of the window at the flickering darkness. “Should have come in the spring.”

“Mm?”

“I hear it's _picturesque_.”

“Ha.”

“Quite.”

“Oh well,” said Joan, which Sherlock knew meant _too late now_.

Now that the silence had been stirred Sherlock felt restless with it. She uncoiled herself a little, straightening her back and shoulders, turning her face forwards and away from the dark outside. Addressing the back of the empty passenger seat, she said, “People, you know, have started opening up their houses. To the public. It's been going on for a while.”

“That's not that new, Sherlock. Or that strange.”

“It would be strange if it were your childhood home.”

“ _My_ childhood home, yeah. No one wants to poke around where I grew up.”

“I wouldn't mind,” said Sherlock.

Joan stayed quiet for a few moments, and said finally, “Well, we left. After mum died. Someone else rents it now.”

Before them, the road was just barely lit up by the covered headlamps as the car kept rattling through the night, an island of light and quiet talk in a dark country holding its breath, sheltering from bombs which kept on not falling. Sherlock said, “At least Mycroft agrees with me on the matter. We won’t have day-trippers.”

“But you could. If you wanted.”

“Yes, conceivably.”

Joan shook her head in the edge of Sherlock’s vision, just a flurry of shadow. “What was it like, then? Growing up there.”

Sherlock curled her toes inside her boots and rolled her shoulders, a whole succession of years staggering through her mind, cluttering it with a sudden wave of tongue-tied portraits and stopped grandfather clocks, windows onto sternly-kept lawns, the woods, the pond, the dog they had put down very early on and not gotten another—too noisy—too noisy for Mother with her headaches, too noisy for Mycroft though she tried to put up with it while it was alive— “Too big,” Sherlock said, and looked out of the window again.

But Joan laughed, just a huff of smiling breath, and it didn't sound like she was laughing at Sherlock exactly.

After a few miles, Sherlock realised what she hadn't said. “What about you,” she said, turning her head again but not looking at Joan; “what was it like—for you?”

“Too small,” Joan said, leaning back and giving a long sigh. “Much, much too small.”

Her left hand was on the seat, a few centimetres from Sherlock's thigh. Sherlock didn't have to look over to know. Sherlock knew a lot about Joan's hands. She knew the calluses of her fingers and the shape of her fingernails, the wiry strength of her grip and the surprising softness of her palm. She didn't know how to reach over, across that gulf of centimetres, and touch her skin.

The car was slowing, jolting harder and more irregularly now. They had gone off the road and twigs kept snapping under the wheels. A branch scraped along the side. The headlamps lit up tree trunks sickly yellow. Then the car banked to one side and Sherlock swallowed, knowing that they were close to the pond where she had found, once upon a time, Carl Powers floating face-down, dead, inexplicable.

“My dad,” Joan said suddenly, “taught me to shoot. I think I told you. It was, he was—”

“We're here,” Sherlock said, and finally looked over to meet Joan's eyes. Joan's gaze was pure blue, open. As Sherlock watched, the light receded and her expression set. Sherlock blinked a few times. She knew her mouth was open, knew her lips were trembling ever so slightly. “Tell me after,” she said.

Joan nodded once, perfectly calmly. “Alright,” she said. If only she weren’t so brave, Sherlock thought, but didn’t know how that sentence would end. If only she weren’t so brave, she would never have had me. Would never have interested me. Would never have gone to France. Wouldn’t be about to do this.

* * *

“We go. We check he's not here already. We prepare the drawing room with a time pencil and cap in the grate. We leave. I run back to the car, the driver radios Mycroft, Mycroft organises immediate police presence and army presence, and subsequent arrival of SOE and Secret Service personnel. When the time pencil goes off, the cap sparks, the fire ignites, he sees the light and takes it as a signal. You lock the doors from the outside. We very much hope he's armed and dangerous.”

“Because that’s more suspicious,” Joan said, looking up.

Sherlock nodded, just one slow dip of her head. “As long as he’s demonstrably acting outside of his SOE role. As long as it’s enough to get them to dig. We can’t present them with a full solution—firstly because he’s too good for that, and secondly because they wouldn’t believe it.”

“You want them to investigate for themselves.”

“It’s the only way they’ll see.”

“They’re going to think we framed him.”

“They aren’t going to think that for long.”

“But they’re going to arrest us.”

“Yes.”

“Alright. As long as we’ve got that clear. But he’s going to realise it’s a trap quickly.”

“That’s why I want the guns.”

* * *

Sherlock shoved her door open, planting her boots on the ground and taking her gun in hand.

Back. Back in this damn place (but with Joan) and back acting instead of running (with Joan) and—back. She breathed in the smell of rotting wood and greenery and started to walk.

Leaving France hadn't been easy. Using her SOE-mandated alternative documents would have raised flags; she had had to get forgeries in Paris. Sleeping hadn't been safe anywhere. She had avoided the difficulty by staying awake for three days straight. Then she had smuggled herself into a train carrying supplies south—hoping very much that no Resistance cell had plans to target it—and passed out with her cheek against a bag of grain.

With German troops now in what had been Vichy, communication between the two halves of France had been improved. Staggering to an isolated farmhouse she had heard was harbouring Jews, she explained that she was a British agent and that she needed to get out. She had ended up travelling across the south in the back of a hearse, and though irony hadn’t been lost on her it had lost its charm after the third hour of hot, cramped, sweat-rankled darkness.

After that: a trek through forestry. And that was what Sherlock was remembering as she moved through the familiar dark. That and the times she had been here before. Here: running with the dog. Always _the dog_ ; Sherlock didn’t think of it by name any longer. Here: falling out of that tree, breaking her arm. Nine years old. Just ahead: where the crows liked to roost. The blackness was vivid with the past. She was breathing memory. And there were Joan’s footsteps behind her.

Every so often she stopped, ran a hand along a tree-trunk, knelt to pick up decaying leaves and soil and rub them between her fingers. Sniff. The geography of the wood was spinning out in colours in her mind, a little more filling out each moment. Yes. Here. Here. Here. There. Here. There. Her heart was even. Joan’s steps were even.

The trees were thinning and Sherlock stopped.

They were at the back of the darkened house. It stood there, black on black, just visible in the moonlight, the roof glinting slightly. Joan was by her side, at her shoulder, her breath stirring the crystalline air. The wood groaned and whispered in the wind, which was natural cover; it was a tumultuous night, shaking branches and trying to tug Sherlock’s curls out of the band she had tied them back with. Sherlock glanced up once. The stars looked frozen. She touched Joan once on the arm—a signal that she should stay where she was, nothing more—and dropped to the ground.

Undignified, this hard-paced crawl along the damp grass, elbows in the dirt and stomach dragging against the ground as she clawed herself closer—strange to approach the house she had grown up in almost as an interloper.

She stopped before the tradesman’s entrance, running her hands over the stone steps which led to it. Nothing. Clear. From her pocket, she pulled a hairpin, crawled up the steps, slid it up the cracks on the latch side of the door. A tiny pull of resistance, a sudden snap—enough to make Sherlock’s breath stop. Good. _I’ve had someone prepare the doors for you_ , Mycroft had said. _You’ll be able to tell if they’ve been opened since._ True to her word, someone had wound a strand of hair about the latch and then pulled it out, attached it to the other side of the door. Impossible to open it without snapping.

But there were two doors, and the front of the house was more exposed to anybody either inside or outside. Sherlock had seen the calluses on Harding’s hands. The man could shoot. The man could snipe, in fact.

Slowly, she rose to her feet, pushed the key into the lock and opened the door. It glided noiselessly forwards. Mycroft’s affinity for silence, for making everything smooth and untroublesome. Sherlock’s breath was even as she walked through into the back kitchen, the dining room, the front hallway. Harding could be in here, she knew. She felt like she had been moving for hours. She wished for Mycroft’s sense of time. Though perhaps she didn’t. How torturous, to feel each second—

She reached the front door, to her own surprise, without being shot in the head. Her hairpin flashed in her hand again and again she felt that tiny tug of resistance just under the latch and the sudden release.

She breathed in in a rush of relief. There was no way Harding could have managed to get in through the windows without breaking them and he hadn’t; the doors were both secure. She was alone in the house. She turned and fled to the back door again, throwing it open, hoping that outside it was dark enough for Joan to be hidden as she ran, and not so dark that she wouldn’t see the door opening. A shadow detached itself from the woods and cut across the lawn.

Every moment another moment prone to explode, every moment threatening to be shattered by the crack of a gunshot and a yell, the thud of a body falling to the ground; every moment brittle, precarious, but there Joan was and Sherlock snatched at her—she was so _warm_ —to drag her inside and close the door.

For three seconds exactly they stayed still and breathed evenly, the warm air which Joan exhaled brushing Sherlock’s cheek.

“This way,” Sherlock said, and began to dart through the house. Like the woods it was smeared with memories, unlike itself in the dark and yet all too familiar. There was no need for torches; they would have only disaccustomed their eyes to the blackness, and Sherlock knew her way. Her knuckles grazed the wallpaper, brushed against doorframes (yes; the old switchblade nicks—how old had she been—oh, eight, yes, and how much trouble was there—?)

Here: the drawing room door. Sherlock stopped and Joan stopped beside her. “In there,” Sherlock said softly, “the blackout curtains are already cracked open.”

“So no light.”

“No.”

“You want me to set a time pencil trap with no light.”

“Yes.”

“In a fireplace.”

“Yes.”

“You fancy doing it instead?”

“I trust you. Come on, is it more difficult than anything you did in France?”

“Fair,” Joan muttered, and opened the door, and walked on through.

* * *

Knees on the hearth, Joan closed her eyes and worked by touch, working the percussion cap into place and preparing the grate so that the fire would catch. Her breathing snagged the silence. She could feel sweat slipping between her neck and her collar, but her hands were dry.

She took a breath, crunched the copper tube, and withdrew her hand. She felt Sherlock crouch beside her—the darkness making her presence more feral, so that Joan felt suddenly as if she were feeling some terrible, temporarily harnessed force of nature brush against her. There was the noise of something being emptied out of a bottle and the sudden smell of petrol.

“ _Sherlock_ ,” Joan said.

“Just making sure it catches,” said Sherlock, smashing the illusion of her animal nature and standing up. Joan stood with her, and they moved without speaking out of the room, out of the house, out into the night. Joan started at the sudden warm pressure of fingers at her hand, but Sherlock let go instantaneously, detached herself from Joan’s company—just a moving patch of dark and the faint crunch of footsteps as she ran off in the direction of the waiting car—and then nothing. 

So Joan was alone with the house standing over her and the dark green smell of the wood. She kept moving, crept along the edge of the trees, turning to keep the lawn and the building within her sights. She wished she could see her watch. But they must be early. And Sherlock must know. She must be keeping them to schedule.

Bewilderingly, the night was alive with noise. Twigs snapped, badgers barked and screamed, owls called, the wind rattled through the spindly winter-stripped branches of the woods. The night was cold enough to slow down the time pencil; it felt like an age until finally a flicker of dull light interrupted the rowdy darkness, glowing through a chink on the blackout curtains in the drawing room window, just a scratch of brightness on the whole scene. A lying sign of life in an empty house. Sherlock must have contacted Mycroft by now. Joan kept hunkered down at the fringe of the woods, her pistol in her hand and her skin damp with cooling sweat, her muscles primed, her heart hamering like an ack-ack gun. There was nothing on her mind. Long stretches of cool silence unimpinged upon by the clamour of the woods and the wind. She had felt worse.

And then there was a shadow. And as this shadow flickered across the lawn with an uncanny, apelike swiftness, the glint of gunmetal caught the orange light of the fire.

Joan breathed in and felt relief.

She knew three things. One: whatever Sherlock hoped, the mere fact of Harding snooping around Sherlock’s childhood home would be nothing compared to their having arrived armed and dangerous, and in Sherlock’s case, inexplicably alive. Two: nonetheless, someone had to do something about Harding. Three: it would be better to hang for real murder than fake treachery.

She reached into her pocket and switched on the bulky microphone.

Really she had known all this since hearing the plan, and known she would act on it since picking up the microphone from the store in 221C, thinking that if she could, if she somehow could, she might be able to get evidence against him, or at least evidence that she had been provoked, or acting in self-defence, or whatever might happen, though it could be proof of pre-meditation, though it was proof of pre-meditation, though it meant diverting from the plan.

The shadow disappeared into the house, and Joan started to run.

* * *

“We don’t go into the house,” said Joan. “Not after the first time.”

“Exactly,” said Sherlock.

“Promise me, Sherlock.”

“I promise. You?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

* * *

The door gave soundlessly. Joan locked it from the inside, then moved as fast as she could to the front door, wrenched the lock fast and leaned her forehead against it for a moment. It didn’t matter how much noise she made. Harding expected to have company. Her gun was in her hand. _The key is not to hesitate_. Fairbanks’ voice. _The key is to shoot and keep shooting until everything’s quiet._ Or was that Harding’s advice? Or was it her own idea?

She stepped closer to the door of the drawing room, and then she heard the creak from the stairs and whipped around. She stepped forwards—and there was the clatter of running feet, so she took off, racing up the stairs after him, stumbling at the top and lunging forwards with a grabbing hand but finding herself in silence, darkness, again: where was he? 

Joan grabbed her torch from her pocket, flicked it on, panned it around the landing, saw nothing: then the light swung down the huge expanse of the staircase and hit Harding full on where he stood at the foot of the stairs, with his gun raised and his pupils pinprick tiny in the white brightness.

Joan froze.

Harding froze too.

Why would Harding have been running? Why had those footsteps been so light? And why wouldn’t Sherlock have followed exactly Joan’s train of thought?

All of these thoughts passed through Joan’s mind in a second, along with: please God let me live.

But Harding didn’t shoot. And Joan didn’t shoot.

And then from behind her came Sherlock, knocking her aside—the torch dropping, rolling down the stairs, bouncing a circle of light wildly across the wallpaper—the bannisters like the bars of a prison—Harding’s boots—Joan’s cheek was against the carpet, her head swimming—and Sherlock was firing once, twice, three four five six times but there was no hit, Joan could hear there was no hit, just the clatter of running footsteps and the ricochet of bullets. 

Then Sherlock’s weight was gone from Joan’s shoulder and Joan could hear her sprinting down the stairs, reloading as she went. Joan scrambled up and ran after her, kicked away the torch she had dropped, grabbed Sherlock— _hard_ , nails digging into flesh through Sherlock’s jacket—and practically threw her into the first room she came to, slamming the door behind her. She seized the torch from Sherlock, flashed it around with her gun in her hand.

Nothing. She breathed out long and low, her back against the door. Then she found Sherlock’s face with the torch’s beam.

They looked at each other, panting hard, for a long moment.

“Thought if you heard someone run up the stairs you’d have to follow me,” Sherlock said in tones of explanation, her voice ragged. In the circle of white light from Joan’s torch her skin was bluish pale, her cheeks desperately hollow.“I knew Harding was in the back kitchen, you’d have a good shot at getting up the stairs before he did. So I—wanted you to be—when I realised you’d come in, I—didn’t want you to do anything foolish.”

“Too late,” Joan gasped. “Sorry. God. Sorry.”

“No,” Sherlock said. “No, I’m sorry. Joan. I, I—”

“Shh,” Joan begged. “Shh, Sherlock, shut up, he’ll—”

Sherlock shook her head. “Trust me,” she panted. “The walls are thick. I grew up here. You can whisper.”

Joan heaved in her breath and leaned her head back against the door. Her lungs were burning. Slowly, as if being drawn out of her throat on a long, fine thread, she began to laugh, a whispering, hushed, helpless laugh.

“What?” Sherlock said, and Joan could hear a terrible hilarity in her voice as well.

“It _is_ too big,” Joan said, and Sherlock gave a near whine of laughter, muffled in the back of her hand. Joan lowered her head and fixed Sherlock in the torch’s beam again, watching as she shoved black sweaty curls away from her forehead and grinned with a fantastic violence.

“What now?” Joan said.

“You’ve rendered us sitting ducks,” Sherlock said.

“We could break the window and run,” Joan replied.

“You don’t want to do that.”

“No. I don’t. I want to prove you’re innocent.”

“Is that what this is about?”

“Yes. Sherlock. Yes it is. And it’s also about a gaping hole in British intelligence.”

“Yes. It is. I suppose.”

“Where is he?”

“A good question,” Sherlock said. “Turn off that damn torch.”

“Why—oh God,” Joan said, thinking of the cracks between door and floor, door and doorframe, and flicking the torch off.

There was a long, breathing silence. No sound. Not the creak of a boot or the rustle of fabric or the whine of floorboards. It wasn’t reassuring.

“Come here,” Joan whispered, and Sherlock crept obediently forwards.

Hands knocking hands. Bodyheat. The drag of knuckles over the front of Joan’s jacket, the slow caress of Sherlock’s hand against her neck. Her fingers were long, warm, roughened at the tips. Joan closed her eyes. They were going to die tonight, she thought. Their lips didn’t touch. Joan ran her hands over Sherlock’s waist, up her torso, not groping but trying to feel her, feel her ribs, feel her spine, feel her breasts, her shoulders, forearms, hands, feel her to be alive, to be, for now, alive.

“Sherlock,” Joan rasped, “Sherlock,” and a shot rang out. Joan’s fingernails were suddenly in Sherlock’s palms. The noise had come from outside.

“The driver,” Joan said, and then they were running, slamming open the door to the hallway, out, out, into the night, grass crunching under their boots, as if it were Inverness, as if it were another race. Joan kept her hold on the torch and kept it switched off, kept her pace with Sherlock, kept her gun raised and every inch of her body attuned to the noises around them, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling. She ducked a branch she could barely see, letting Sherlock stay slightly ahead, their boots slamming against the ground, snapping twigs. And there was the car in the clearing, just before the pool. There, before it, a dark heap on the ground, was the driver.

Joan knew her mistake as she made it, as she felt Sherlock fall away from her side. The second spanned eons, in which Joan thought: yes, this is how I would do it. Yes, if I had to confuse someone. Yes. A gunshot used as a lure. The darkness. The trees. The confusion. The wind. The darkness. The darkness. The darkness.

In her left hand her torch came to life. In her right was her gun. She swung around. The violent light caught Harding and Sherlock, Harding’s arm tight about Sherlock’s neck, his revolver against her temple, and Sherlock’s face for a moment seeming terribly sad.

Harding said nothing. Joan said, “Let her go,” and at that Harding sighed, kissed his teeth and looked grim. He glanced away, mouth tight with a kind of tired anger.

“Christ, Watson,” he said, glancing back at her. “That’s not going to work.”

“Let. Her go.”

“ _Watson_.”

The brief, terrible sadness which had transformed Sherlock’s face was gone, if it had ever been there at all. Now she was absent. Joan could see it in her gaze. It was impossible to make eye contact with her. She could have been staring right through into the next life. Joan breathed out slowly and looked to Harding. The harsh light of the torch cut his face into hard angles and triangles of shadow.

“Why’ve you done this,” she said. “I thought. I thought— _why_ have you done this.”

Harding gave a hard, laughing, mirthless snort and shook his head, grimacing. “Watson,” he said. “I owe you an explanation, I know.”

“Really. Do you really. Well, that’s really quite touching, sir. Let her go. Just let her go and drop the gun, and then maybe you can give me that explanation.”

His jaw set, his mouth in a strange, wry smile. Joan could almost have called it weary. “Come on,” he said. “You’re at a loss. Watson?”

“What.”

“I know it’ll make it harder for you to keep from shooting me if I apologise.”

“You know me so well.”

“Still, I’m sorry.”

“Prove it and let her go.”

“Chrissakes, Lieutenant, why would I be doing this if that were an option?” Joan saw the barrel of Harding’s gun push harder against Sherlock’s temple, saw Sherlock blink, her mouth tremble, though her eyes remained distant.

“It is an option,” Joan said, staring at Sherlock and realising she had never seen her look so scared. 

“You’re not bloody stupid, so don’t act like it.”

“If you kill her,” Joan said, her voice as steady as her gun, dark and calm, “I will personally ensure that you regret it. Sir.”

“I know,” said Harding. “I know you’ll try. Watson. Look at me. You’re angry.”

“Yes! I am angry!”

“But I’m not the one you should be angry at.”

“No? Really?” Joan breathed in hard, swallowed convulsively. She thought of the microphone in her pocket stuttering away, recording everything. “You’re a traitor. _You_.”

Harding’s lip curled, his eyes darkening. His menace was still underpinned with that terrible weariness. If Joan looked too close, she saw the embers of a defeated and melancholy tenderness stirring in his gaze. “Yeah,” he said, his voice resigned and calm. “Too right, Watson. I’m a traitor to an institution which sends its agents out there into occupied territory and gets them killed. I’m a traitor to Britain, because Britain’s done so much for me and for you.”

Good. Good. That was good for the tape. They could get out of this still. Still. “Don’t you dare talk politics when you’ve got a gun pointed at an innocent woman.”

“The only thing I regret, Watson, is betraying you,” Harding said. “I would have left if I thought anyone else was going to keep my agents safe.”

“Safe! Was Corentin safe? And Scientist, and Professor, and all their associates? Go on, sir. Tell me what your disloyalty achieved. Since you were talking about it not too long ago.”

“You tell—”

“No, you tell me,” Joan spat, the torchlight wavering for the first time. “You tell me in your own damn words what it achieved, you tell me how many people it got killed and how many people it hurt. You tell me.”

“Steady, Watson. I’ve got Sherlock Holmes at gunpoint. Remember.”

“I’m waiting.”

The torchlight was fizzling, flickering. The battery was running low. The shifting shadows belied the stillness of Harding’s face. After a long time, he said, “Don’t look at me like you don’t understand it, Watson.”

“I don’t understand it,” Joan said through gritted teeth, but the protest felt flimsy, wavering. She could hear the desperation in her own voice and she hated it.

“You don’t want to.”

“No, I don’t understand it. No.”

“Jesus, Watson. Come on. Sherlock Holmes at gunpoint. You know why I did it.”

Joan’s breath hitched and she swallowed hard. He was right. Though it rocked the foundations of her image of herself, she understood. Her eyes flicked between Sherlock and Harding and, unbidden, the memory of Harding making a joke about shooting Sherlock during that first firearms lesson rose in her mind. Strong as the smell of fresh grass. He wasn’t changed at all, that was the problem; still rusty, upright, slightly lumbering but never giving the impression of clumsiness. Sharp, canny, crooked-smiling. And a traitor, and a good man.

“Because you couldn’t, you couldn’t be betrayed,” Joan managed, “if you were already betraying everybody.”

Harding sighed out a long breath, pursed his lips, and seemed to be looking far away. Against Sherlock’s temple, his pistol never wavered. There was a kind of old sadness in his eyes, a grief hammered so hard into him that it was just part of him by now, as if he’d been bored tired of the world.

“Funny thing,” he said, voice mild and sober, stirring the silence only slightly. “When it started, I thought I was running the double operation of a lifetime. Collecting information on her—on Brook. And waiting for the day when I could turn it over, roll up everything she had, bring her in, disrupt German intelligence operations across the Continent, show up the obvious holes in our system which no one wants to spend enough to fix, discredit at least two prominent members of the Nazi party, hand over certain coding techniques she’d gotten wind of to Bletchley…”

“And then what?”

Harding sighed again. “Then,” he said, “I got the creeping feeling it would make no difference.”

“Let her go. Sir.”

“I liked you, Watson. Still do. You’re a good sort. Damn brave sort.”

“Don’t.”

“Remind me of myself, actually. Scrappy and clever. Good officer material, but not too high. You were built to be someone’s second-in-command, weren’t you? Me too. No shame in it. It’s just how we were made. And when we lose our CO...”

“Don’t.”

“You’re a bit dim, Lieutenant, when it comes to Holmes.”

“That’s me,” Joan said, her tone ferocious. The torch was flickering more erratically now, leaving Joan split seconds of darkness and heaving, lurid after-images swimming in her eyes. “They’ll put that on my gravestone. Any moment now, I expect.”

“There’s no need for that. I don’t want to kill you.”

“You’ll have to. Go on. I can see you’re dying to say it, why am I _a bit dim_ when it comes to Holmes?”

“He’s holding me hostage,” said Sherlock, with a slow sigh which sounded almost dreamy, as if she were fading wearily back into the world. Joan’s gaze found hers and a fist closed about her heart as she saw the light in Sherlock’s eyes, the flickering receptivity she had cracked open that one day in Wanborough, long ago. “If he’s holding me hostage, he wants something from you.”

Slowly, Joan transferred her gaze from Sherlock to Harding.

“Yes,” Harding said, very quietly. “Watson?”

“What?”

“That jacket of yours. Is there a microphone in the pocket?”

The shuddering grimace which overtook Joan’s face was minute, but she knew it was answer enough, hated herself for not being able to stop herself giving it. Harding nodded. “Thought so. Good, that. Clever. Take the jacket off and throw it into the water.”

Joan closed her eyes for a brief moment. “And then you’ll let her go,” she said, her voice cracking just a little as she opened her eyes and looked to Harding. But Harding’s expression was weary and set and Sherlock’s face had that awful sadness on it again, her lips parted and trembling, her eyes shadowed, her jaw slack. This time it lasted.

“No, Joan,” she murmured. Joan felt a tiny shudder spark through her at Sherlock’s tone. It had all the tired, warm drag of the way she spoke late at night, between sheets, face pressed into Joan’s shoulder, and none of the comfort. 

“Sorry,” Harding said, and as Joan watched he moved his gun from Sherlock’s temple to the back of her neck, moved his arm from her neck to her waist, and Sherlock’s eyelashes fluttered to her cheeks. The torch shuttered and fizzled again, flashing, dimming, brightening. “Sorry, Watson.She’s too difficult to explain.”

“So what. So what, what are you—”

The torch went off for a second, so that Joan saw ghostly imprints of Harding and Sherlock and felt a brief sense of horror—but when the light returned, they were both still there. The second had been long enough to hear Sherlock gasp in it. Joan guessed Harding had grabbed her tighter. Nerves. They were all crackling with nerves. Perhaps that was the problem, Joan thought wildly, the problem with her and Harding, they were too damn good at staying calm and being good, and then—just like Harry said—then—something just burst through the bars of its cage...

“If I shoot her here,” Harding was saying, pushing the gun harder against Sherlock’s neck for a moment, “she won’t die right away. I’d say paralysis followed by choking on her own blood. If I shoot her in the head it will be immediate. Possibly even painless. Destroy that microphone, and that’s what you buy her.”

“No,” said Joan. “No, no.”

“Joan,” Sherlock said, blinking rapidly and, “Shut _up_ ,” Joan snarled at her, “shut up, you’re not dying on me again, Sherlock!”

“ _Joan_.”

“Watson,” Harding said, and Joan realised what Sherlock was doing, and what she had to do, and how to do it. Her hands were shaking hard, shaking like they had never done while she held a gun before, and her mouth was twisted. “Put your gun on the ground, carefully, and then get rid of the jacket. All of it. No pulling anything out of your pockets. Just throw it in the water.”

Joan listened but never looked away from Sherlock. “You alright?” she asked. Pointless, really. Sherlock managed a wan smile. Joan managed one back. Sherlock’s eyelids fluttered again, her lips trembling.

Slowly, Joan crouched, placed her gun on the ground, and stood up. She looked to Harding, who nodded. She looked to Sherlock. “Right,” she said. “Right. Right then. I—” She swallowed, turned, took four steps towards the pool. After one look at the brownish water surrounded by dirt and dry leaves and outcrops of greyish-green rock, she closed her eyes. “Sherlock, I—”

“I know.”

“Good.” She opened her eyes, put her torch in her mouth, grapped the lapels of her jacket, the beaten-up leather, and shucked it from her frame. Then she breathed in, prayed, and threw it.

It hit the rocks at the side of the pool.

And with a great crack and bang and a sudden lick of bright flame, the silence was sliced open, as the three explosive caps in the pocket snapped at the impact.

It was enough—Joan saw in slow motion, staggering backwards, snatching the torch from her mouth to shine it on Harding and Sherlock—it was enough to make Harding start. And that was enough for Sherlock to wrench the gun from his hand, with a horrible crack of what sounded like bone.

The torch kept flicking on and off, the light dimming and brightening, dimming and brightening, slicing up the whole scene. Joan’s blood was roaring in her ears as she ran for her gun and saw Sherlock’s teeth in Harding’s arm, saw Harding’s hand in Sherlock’s hair, her knee in his stomach and her nose spurting blood his arm dangling her wrist twisting a clump of curls wound around Harding’s fingers teeth fingers nails and staggering staggering tripping splash, silence

for a breath and then it started again. The water heaved like the pool was boiling. Joan’s gun was in her hand and she raised it, torchlight swinging, flicking, flashing on and off. The grip was slippery. Do it, she thought. Don’t hesitate. Was that Harding or Fairbanks or me? Why do I _care_ —

They shot up from the water with a choking gasp, Sherlock’s hands scrabbling for purchase on Harding’s throat and Harding’s thumb pressing horribly at Sherlock’s eye: then Harding forced her down beneath the water again, and Sherlock dragged him down with her. Joan saw them, indistinguishable, wrestling beneath the water—then Harding surfacing. Without Sherlock. Hands beneath the water. A dark mass beneath him. The torch went out. Joan took a breath. Took aim in the dark. Shot.

A strangled cry, the slap of water on rocks, water on skin, the scrabbling of nails, a ragged and horrible breath, a noise like choking, then like nothing, like a silent dark night. Water lapping and stilling. Joan shook the torch. Shook it again. It was still dark.

“Sherlock,” she said.

“Yes,” said Sherlock.

“Is he.”

“Yes.”

“Are you—”

There was the rush and suck of water, and Joan felt a shudder rack her whole body, but it was only Sherlock hoisting herself out of the water. There was no sound of her standing up. Joan heard her coughing, hacking. Slowly, she knelt down, shoved her gun in her waistband, and patted the ground until her hands were on Sherlock’s shuddering form.

Slowly, she pulled her and rolled her onto her side, ran her hands over every part of her she could reach. Clutched her in the dark. Checked for wounds. Bloody nose. Cut hands. Dislocated left wrist. Something wrong with her right foot from how she groaned and flinched when Joan touched it, but she resisted all attempts to get her boot off. And, of course, smoker’s lungs, so that she hacked and hacked and hacked.

“Glad you got better at Morse Code,” Sherlock rasped eventually when she had coughed herself weak, her voicy giddy with pain.

“I didn’t,” Joan said. “I just saw you blinking and guessed what was running through your—mad, ridiculous bloody head.”

“ _Mad, ridiculous_ —I’m not the one who ah, _ah_ —”

“What is it?”

“Hurts. Quite a lot. _Don’t_ touch it.”

“Which bit?”

“Most of it. Wrist. Nose. Foot— _don’t_ touch it, _don’t_ —”

“Sherlock.”

“What? _What_?”

“I love you,” Joan said, and wrenched Sherlock’s wrist to the side with a loud pop of bones snapping back into place.

“Wha—oh, God! For _God’s_ sake!”

And then quieter, more raggedly, voice cracked: “For—God’s _sake_ —”

“Shh,” Joan said, “shh, shh, shh,” her hands moving from Sherlock’s wrist to the nape of her neck, tangling in the sodden curls there, while Sherlock shuddered and sobbed, each inward breath seeming to scald her. “Yeah,” Joan said. “Yeah. I know. I know.”

After a long time Sherlock stilled, her breathing calming. Joan kept stroking her hair. “We should radio,” Sherlock said. “Get in the car. Turn on the heater. Wait. For—for this to, ah. Have—consequences.”

“Yeah,” Joan said. “Yeah, we should.”

For that moment, at least, they stayed where they were.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! HAHA OH MY GOODNESS, IT'S ALL COMING TOGETHER. I can now officially confirm that the 29th chapter will be the final chapter. You may have noticed that my schedule's been very erratic, so I'm not going to give a definite date for Chapter 28's posting; just know that it will be within the next three weeks. I've already sent it to my beta, so once we've sorted through her thoughts on it it shouldn't be long. Thank you so much for your unerring patience.
> 
> Now, to the notes!
> 
>  **"The Bastards of Broadway"** \- MI6, who had their HQ in Broadway until the sixties. [More info](https://www.sis.gov.uk/our-history/buildings.html). MI6 did indeed run agents in occupied territories during WW2, and also in Germany itself, though collaboration between MI6 and SOE agents isn't really documented, chiefly because they absolutely hated each other. MI6 were trying to run deep, deep cover operations which relied on minimising disturbance and being subtle; SOE were trying to cause as much disturbance as possible. (And yes, SOE really did refer to MI6 as the Bastards of Broadway).
> 
>  **"the recording microphone"** \- Pretty cutting edge technology for 1942, considering it's portable. I imagine it's something like [this](http://www.pimall.com/nais/pivintage/minipon.html); more info at the link.
> 
>  **"certain coding techniques"** \- I ain't saying Moriarty cracked Enigma, but I am saying you should consider the possibility.


	28. Easy To Love

The territorial inter-spook squabble which followed the events at the empty house was nearly as vicious as the events themselves, and almost certainly generated more paperwork. SOE took over from the police, then MI5 tried to take over from SOE and MI6 tried to take over from MI5, while MIs 9 and 19 struggled, underfunded and underinformed, at the outskirts of the scrum. Joan spent three days in a neutral London safe flat under armed guard with no interrogation, and later discovered it was because the Foreign Office, the Home Office and the Ministry for Economic Warfare were all at odds, each trying to take as much credit and as little blame as possible, and nothing was getting done. Finally, however, she was moved to a house in south London which was, from the outside, sturdily attractive and indicative of a sort of satisfied, unaristocratic well-offness, and which was, inside, a prison. As for Sherlock, the last Joan had seen of her she was being half-helped, half-dragged, limping and baring her teeth with a wildcat fury, to a separate car, and driven off.

It was difficult to start telling the truth. Once started, it was difficult to stop. And that was fortunate, because they wanted Joan to tell the story often. But these were not the only questions asked.

“Are you a sexual deviant, Lieutenant?”

The interrogator was called Tin Eye because of the monocle around which he squinted, disturbing the proportions of his face and forcing a permanent tension in his forehead and jaw. He was a Lieutenant Colonel and Joan couldn’t remember his real name. When he asked the question Joan was sitting quietly across from him, handcuffed to the table, hair unwashed, fingernails filthy, but eyes calm.

“No, sir.”

“Got a young man?”

“No, sir.”

“Ever had a young man?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go on.”

Joan looked at him with an utter absence of expression. Then she said, “I’ve had a few men friends.”

“Names?”

“I didn’t know their names.”

“And you’re not a sexual deviant?”

“With respect, sir, they didn’t know my name either.”

“What’s your relationship to Sherlock Holmes?”

“We’re friends and colleagues.”

“Close friends.”

“Yes.”

“You two spent a night together at a hotel in London on July 24th, 1942. Was it a sexual encounter, Watson?”

“No.”

“Did you sleep in the same bed?”

“The room was a twin room, not a double.”

“That wasn’t my question, Watson.”

“No, we did not sleep in the same bed.”

“Have you ever slept in the same bed?”

“Yes, sir,” Joan said. “In France. The situation called for us to make do, sir.”

Tin Eye’s skewed face skewed further. He had an ugly, bulldoggish way about him, a tendency to grunt his questions. And he had many questions. He was a good interrogator. Joan knew this was why he was pressing her on the matter. She also knew that a good interrogator likes particularly to ask questions which he knows the answer to already. The thought made her feel sick and skinned raw but she kept on staring back at him, thinking herself calm.

“Watson,” Tin Eye said, “you spent some time in France in your earlier life, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir. I did.”

“With people?”

“With a schoolfriend and her brother.”

“Names?”

“Persephone Phelps and Sebastian Phelps.”

“Persephone. What a mouthful. Was that how you knew her?”

“Her nickname was Persie.”

“Percy. A boy’s name.”

“I suppose. It was her mother who gave her the nickname.”

“What did she call you?”

“She called me Joan.”

“Were you close?”

“Yes, we were.”

“Why no longer?”

“We fell out in France.”

“Politically?”

“Personally.”

“Did you ever share a bed with her?”

And so on. And on. And on. Tin Eye could see Joan’s lip curling in uncomfortable disgust, she knew it. He saw her throat bob and her teeth grit when he asked her, “Have you ever heard of a psychiatric disorder known as transvestism?” and, “How would you describe your sexual appetite, Watson?” (“Yes,” she said, and, “With respect, sir, if dressing in trousers is anything to do with treachery, you had better tell the War Office to issue new battledress for all women in the military and call up our American cousins about Katharine Hepburn,” and, after she had weathered the storm for that: “Typical for my age,” she said.)

Then he screwed up his meaty, bulldog face and poured water from a jug into his glass—the only glass on the table. Joan watched, so thirsty that the inside of her mouth felt tacky and unclean. After he had noisily drunk his fill he settled back, put the glass down, clink, on the table, and said, with a smile, “You were fucking Holmes.”

When Joan said, “No,” the word had the fluid force of a whole-body wave of revulsion. 

Tin Eye had changed his tactics with a speed which only shook Joan more. His mask of military authority had slipped into an ugly, powerful leer. “What was it like? I’ve met her—oh, look at that. Your ears pricked up. No, she’s not here. I’ve met her, though. Rather a nice little piece, isn’t she? Or she would be if she were cleaned up. When I saw her she was in a bit of a state.” Joan stared straight ahead. “I imagine she’d be quite a goer. Spiky girls like that usually are. What do you say, Joan? Is she fun? Or does she freeze up?”

Joan didn’t blink or react.

“Like that,” Tin Eye sighed. “Exactly like that, yes. I imagine the answer is that she’s both. Fun if she likes it. Freezing if she doesn’t.”

Joan bit down hard on her own tongue. He was trying to make her angry and careless. After three long seconds of staring into Tin Eye’s monocle, she opened her mouth and said, very quietly, “This would be a damn good interrogation technique, sir, if I had anything to confess.”

The monocle had flashed. The interview had ended shortly after.

Her stay in the detention centre lasted for two and a half weeks. In that time Tin Eye made her think about straying from her story only once. It was when he said, “Your brother has been in contact with SOE. Asking for you.”

Joan closed her eyes and thought that she could say yes: yes, I betrayed Harding, SOE, my country. Get me out of here so that he knows what’s happened to me. She didn’t do it. It was only a brief, weightless temptation, inspired by the certainty that she was dead whatever happened, so that she might as well lie to avoid all the waiting, so that Harry could—so that Harry could—so that all this could be over. But it would have been impossible to do without dragging Sherlock down with her, and she had realised she didn’t want to die a liar. She wasn’t sure, anyway, if it was even true.

After sixteen days, her door was opened and Lestrade came into her room. Stretched out on her low camp bed, she gave him a vague and not entirely interested look.

“Captain,” she said. And then: “Oh. Major. Congratulations.”

Lestrade looked grimly around at the whitewashed walls of the place they always referred to as Joan’s room rather than her cell, though the barred windows and meagre prison furnishings betrayed its true nature. “I hate this place,” he said shortly. “Come on. The boys from the Box have handed you over to our care.”

“Well, thank God for that,” Joan said, with enough sarcasm to strip the paint from the walls. Lestrade gave her an odd look, and tossed her a tied-up bundle of clothing: her own, which had been exchanged for a drab brown uniform upon her entry to the detention centre. He left to let her change. When she opened the door, she waited for handcuffs, but instead Lestrade just strode ahead of her and trusted her to follow.

When they got outside, Joan said, “Holmes?” and Lestrade replied, “Strictly taboo.” Joan didn’t press further. The jorney was a silent one.

To Joan’s intense surprise and slight alarm, she was returned to 221B. She wasn’t under house arrest, technically. No one had told her she couldn’t leave. But the understanding that she would not stray beyond Baker Street was there, and so Joan stayed in, smoking too many cigarettes, talking to Mrs Hudson, listening to the wireless. News of the war.

She grew very familiar with the techniques of interrogation. Sometimes she was interviewed in an interrogation room like the one at the detention centre; sometimes it was just that someone, usually Lestrade or a FANY ensign named Eve Mull, ‘dropped by to see how she was doing’, and whoever it was she could see them mentally taking notes as they smiled encouragingly at her and drank the tea Mrs Hudson plied them with. Every interaction with SOE was an interrogation. To be quite honest she preferred the sessions in actual interrogation rooms. It gave her something to do, and somewhere to go which wasn’t the flat. And it gave her a chance to say it all, finally. Retelling the story should have been tedious. It wasn’t. It was painful, but Joan revelled in breaking the final seal of secrecy, of telling it over and over and over again.

This didn’t mean that they believed her easily.

“There is no SOE store in 221C Baker Street,” Collier had said. Collier was the small, dark man who had interrogated Joan the day she had been flown back to England. He was now a fixture in Joan’s life. She had almost come to like him. She wasn’t surprised that she had nevertheless avoided it.

At this news, though, Joan looked up slowly from the scratched tabletop, mouth opening and dangerous hope flaring like a weak flame in her chest.

“You mean it was Harding’s,” she said. “You mean you’ve got concrete evidence against him. You’ve got concrete evidence, at least, that he was stealing from SOE.”

“No,” said Collier. “Because there is nothing whatsoever in 221C, despite your claims.”

“No,” Joan replied. “No, there are. That’s where we got everything. The caps, the microphone, the guns, the time pencil, everything. There are weapons, explosives, recording devices…”

Collier shook his head. “He got in,” Joan said, “he moved everything. He hid it. For God’s sake, isn’t the equipment we took from it evidence enough?”

“That will be all, Lieutenant.”

But a day afterwards she had been brought to Lestrade’s office by an armed soldier, made to sit down, and shown pictures of a jumble of metal in the back of a car. She looked up from them—looked to Lestrade’s fresh new Major’s insignia—looked into his eyes. “That’s them. Where did you find them?”

“The car was parked three miles away from Sherrinford House. They’re all of the types stocked by SOE, but no one’s reported anything missing, which poses a problem.”

“Easy. He claimed them for training schools and fudged the reports. It wouldn’t be hard.”

“There are no fingerprints, no evidence that Moran had anything to do with them.” That was another thing. The name Harding was poison. Only his workname was allowed. Joan didn’t know why this was supposed to make the entire mess more palatable. She suspected everyone who spoke about him as Moran of trying to distance themselves. The thought how were we to know was thick in the air. People sweated protesting innocence.

“So that gives us nothing, does it?” Joan asked. “A car full of bloody stolen gear and we still aren’t going to say he’s guilty of anything?”

Lestrade looked at her. “It wouldn’t hold up in a court,” he said flatly. “But this isn’t going to court.”

Joan pressed her lips together. “What does that mean, sir,” she said in a low voice. “I’m tired of cloak and dagger. I’m tired of bloody spycraft. Tell me what you mean.”

“It means we’re bloody well burying this.”

“Right. Are you burying me and Sherlock, too?”

Lestrade grimaced. “I don’t want to do that,” he said, which wasn’t either a yes or a no.

So Joan stayed in Baker Street.

* * *

“Telephone for you, Lieutenant,” said Mrs Hudson, and Joan glanced up from the paper. From a moment, she just looked blankly at the older woman across the dim-lit sitting room.

“Who is it?” she asked, with some slight irritation. Nobody called her. The only people in contact with her were SOE, who could walk out of headquarters and fetch her from Baker Street whenever they liked, and who automatically distrusted the phone.

“Your brother, he says.”

Joan blinked once, and then stood up, dropped the paper on the seat. Harry didn’t do telephone calls. He knew she didn’t like them. It was someone else. Her mind clicked into its operational setting, as she rolled her neck and shoulders and strode to the telephone, picking up the receiver and saying tersely, “Joan Watson speaking.”

“Joan,” said Harry. “Joan, hi.”

Joan stared at the wallpaper. “Harry,” she said. “Jesus. It’s actually you.”

“Who else would it be?”

“I don’t know. I just. No. Don’t know. I thought you were in Plymouth. I mean, are you in Plymouth?”

“No, London, I’ve been back for days. What’s this, Joan, are you taking on my bad habits?”

“What?”

“It was bloody difficult to find you,” said Harry, and Joan heard his voice strain, a kind of ache beneath the false cheer in his static-scratchy tone. Guilt spread through her chest like black ink dropped into a glass of water.

“Yeah,” she said. “Sorry. Harry, I’m fine.”

“I had to call up so many army bigwigs, bloody boring lot—all humming and hawing, you could smell the cigar smoke down the bloody telephone line—”

“You’ve got the number now.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I’ve got the number now.”

The flex was in Joan’s left hand and she was gripping it so tight that her knuckles had gone pale. She breathed out slowly, relaxed her hand. It was odd to hear Harry’s voice after everything. It made her past and present jar uncomfortably against each other.

 _Harry, I shot one of the best men I ever met because it turns out he wasn’t_. “So what are you up to now, Harry?”

“Oh, you know. A bit of this, a bit of that.”

 _Harry, I still can’t hate him. I’m angry at him but I don’t hate him. And in fact I miss him._ “You and your friend still…disagreeing?”

“Well. We’re meeting up next week.”

 _He died by drowning, though. And when they told me that I was relieved. Except of course the reason he drowned was because he was weakened by my shot._ “That’s good. That’s really good. Good luck.”

“You and your, er, friend?”

 _She was the one who drowned him, Harry. Dragged him under and held him there._ “Bit complicated.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

 _This was after she faked her death. Broke my—not my heart. Just broke everything._ “It’s alright. We haven’t seen each other in a while.”

“Is that bad or good?”

That, at least, made Joan smile. Good old Harry. A sentimentalist to the last, but never quite a romantic. “I don’t know,” said Joan, which was true. “I need some—time, you know.”

They were being listened to, she knew, but they both had practice at not betraying too much over the phone. Avoiding pronouns. There were stories—girls getting fired because their girlfriends called them up at work and the operator listened in, horrible stories like that. The kind of creeping feeling the very idea gave Joan was unbelievable. It made her feel skinned, raw, open to observation. She wound the flex around her fingers a few times, then let it bounce free. She worried at her lower lip with her tongue.

“So anyway I—” she said all in a rush, in the raised pitch of a hurried telephone goodbye, but Harry interrupted her with, “Can I come and see you?”

Joan swallowed. After a few moments, she said, “Yeah. Yeah, okay. That’d be nice.”

“So the address is...hang on, someone gave me it, I’ve got it somewhere—”

“221B Baker Street,” said Joan.

“Yeah. God, isn’t that expensive?”

“Don’t ask me. Ask His Majesty’s Armed Forces.”

“What are you even _doing_ , Joan?”

“Admin. Apparently I’ve got a knack for it.”

“Good for you. Listen, how’s tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow…” Joan licked her lips, glanced at her watch. “Actually, Harry, could we make it Sunday? There’s something I need to do tomorrow.”

* * *

She had missed the funeral. She had missed the funeral because she was being held at a secure facility and interrogated over her part in the murder of the man whose funeral she had missed. She supposed it was as good an excuse as any.

Harding was buried in a quiet cemetery in North London. Joan had considered it polite to telephone Lestrade after ending the call with Harry, having decided to make the trip to Harding’s grave. It had been a wise decision; apparently her confinement was more serious than she had realised. Lestrade had seemed startled by the request but, after his initial discomfort, he had been sympathetic. He had driven her personally to the cemetery, and now waited at the gates, keeping a constant eye on her. Joan could feel his stare at the small of her back.

She stood before the grave. She thought about how she had never stood before Sherlock’s grave, or gone to her funeral even though she could have. It hadn’t seemed real enough, somehow. Perhaps it had been a premonition. Unlikely, though; it was just a grief so terrible it couldn’t be comprehended. Part of its terror had been its uncertainty, the fact that Joan had seen, heard nothing until six days after it happened: that Sherlock could be so there and then so gone.

But here she was mourning Sherlock at Harding’s grave, and that was all the wrong way around.

She closed her eyes. “Sir,” she said, in the tight, blank voice she had used so often with him. Neutral. Calm. Proving her worth as a soldier and an officer and a spy. Her left hand flexed at her side. _Do you think betrayal has anything to do with belief, Watson?_

“I don’t know what to think, sir,” she said, opening her eyes and looking at the stone. 1898 - 1943. So he had been forty five. And his middle name had been James. Funny the things you didn’t know about people. In the car, Lestrade had said, “He had an ex-wife, you know. No children, thankfully. And she’s not—well. She’s not surprised, at least.” Yes. All sorts of things she hadn’t known about Harding.

“You were, uh,” she tried, but it was an unanchored beginning; what had he been? She stopped herself, swallowed. It didn’t matter. He hadn’t liked outpourings of emotion. Except anger. She supposed she could kick the gravestone, shout to break the empty quiet of the dead. She didn’t. She didn’t want to. It wasn’t that kind of anger.

She supposed that if she had died and he had survived, he would have stood at her grave doing exactly this, staring, feeling angry, feeling cheated, feeling disappointed.

Once more, she said, “I don’t know what to think.” Then she reached out to touch the gravestone but pulled back just before her fingers could touch the stone, gave it one final look, and turned away to walk towards the waiting car.

* * *

“Can I have visitors?” Joan had asked Lestrade on the drive back. When he grimaced, she said; “My brother will get suspicious if I’m not allowed to see him, sir.”

“Public place,” Lestrade said. “And there’ll be someone to watch.”

“Discreetly?”

“How else do we do things?”

Joan smiled. “Harding told me once,” she said, “I mean, he— _Moran_ told us once, all of us, that our job was to ‘confuse, distract, inconvenience, terrify if you have to’. I think I remember him telling us to make bloody nuisances of ourselves.”

“Mm, well,” Lestrade sighed, “you’ve both managed, haven’t you.” Joan didn’t know if he meant her and Harding or her and—strange, how mentally pronouncing Sherlock’s name didn’t come easily. When she came to Joan’s mind it was as a rush of feeling, a bloom of colour, an unsteady yearning and a horrible regret, though Joan didn’t know exactly what she regretted.

Come Sunday, Joan and Harry met in a cafe just off Baker Street, where a steady and discreet rotation of SOE personnel milled about taking tea and reading newspapers, blindingly obvious to Joan but utterly unremarked by Harry.

He looked no different to when she had seen him last and she loved him for it. The sudden hug she had given him when he had shown up—fifteen minutes late—had taken even her by surprise. He smelt of black market cigarettes and Brylcreem. Joan was a brilliant spy, and so didn’t even come near to tears as she pushed her face into his shoulder and breathed in the scent of something, someone like home.

Now they sat opposite each other, and drank tea—like real, normal people. Joan marvelled. “I’ve never felt so loved,” Harry grinned, dropping sweetener into his cup in excess, and groaning when Joan gave him a kick to the ankle, making out she’d gravely injured him.

“Stop faffing about, Harry,” Joan said, hoping he wouldn’t.

They talked of nothing. They talked of absolutely nothing and they talked of it all afternoon. When Joan explained they couldn’t go back to hers because her landlady was half mad and would never believe he was her brother, Harry took her at her word and didn’t ask further questions. He was gloriously unsuspicious, gloriously easy, gloriously simple. As far from spycraft as chalk from cheese—dad had always said they were like chalk and cheese, the two of them.

When it was time for him to go, she hugged him again. But when she had gotten a few steps away down the street, he called her back. “Joan!”

Joan turned, pushing her hair back from her forehead. “What is it?”

“I forgot, I got you something—look—”

He had brought along a terrible fake-crocodile briefcase which various coffee-sipping FANYs and nondescript Times-reading gentlemen had eyed with deep unease, but which he hadn’t opened. Now, though, he was prising the clasps open again, and pulling out—

“Records?” Joan asked, bewildered. He held them out to her. Joan, out of habit, looked at them warily, and then glanced uncertainly at Harry’s face.

“Don’t look like that,” he said. “They’re yours, I’m sure. Found them at Michael’s flat last week.”

“Michael?”

“Michael McCarthy, don’t you remember him?”

“God, I haven’t seen him in years, Harry. Since before I left school, even. Is he still knocking about? I thought he’d have been—I don’t know. Somewhere else by now.”

“Like where?”

“I was thinking probably Pentonville?”

“Joan, you’re so serious. He’s fine, he’s a good bloke. I was staying with him for a while a few years ago. I think you gave me these to look after or something, and I left them there, and everything got confused with me moving around—but look, he doesn’t want them. Just take them. I’m sure they’re yours. You brought them back from France.”

Joan blinked, startled: he was right. Of course. That was Ethel Waters singing No Man’s Mamma, the record she had bought with her second paycheck from Le Monocle; that was Duke Ellington, Jazz A La Carte, which Persie’s brother had given her. And the third, that was Maxine Sullivan and Easy To Love, which had been Persie’s and then had been theirs and then had been Joan’s; that was what she had danced to with Persie one night, clutching her and feeling—very young, somehow, maybe for the first time in her life. She remembered giving them to Harry after coming back from Paris because they seemed to suit him more than her. That was, they didn’t suit the version of herself she had been holding onto so tightly. The version that didn’t dance to jazz, and hadn’t in years now.

She took the records slowly, and looked up at Harry. “Thanks,” she said. “Really. Thanks.”

Harry looked baffled but pleased. “Glad you like them,” he said. “Oh, hell, that’s my bus!” And he went tearing off after it hollering for it to stop, blond hair flying and absurd briefcase swinging merrily by his side. Joan watched him go with the records clutched to her chest; watched the bus stop and then grumble away. She swallowed.

After a few moments, she heard the footsteps of a woman behind her. She knew them immediately to belong to Eve Mull, the ensign who had been assigned as the friendly, girlish face of SOE in all its dealings with Joan. Joan turned, and Eve smiled at her, wearing civvies with an inescapably military air. “Evening, Lieutenant.”

“Ensign.”

“I hope your brother had a nice time?”

Joan raised her eyebrows, and said, “Ensign, all you want is to get your hands on these records.”

Eve, who was entirely without shame, simply shrugged her assent. “Yes, ma’am. We’ll have to take them and test them. The Major’s orders.”

Joan’s brain stuttered for a moment—the Major was dead—but of course she meant Lestrade. She nodded absently, handing the records over. “They’re just old things of mine,” she said. “Be careful with them.”

“Yes ma’am. I’m supposed to accompany you back, too.”

“Yeah,” Joan said. “Alright. How soon can you have them tested?”

“Two days at most, ma’am.”

Strange, being called ma’am. It hadn’t happened in France, of course. She had never been an officer at home before. “Enjoy them, Ensign,” Joan sighed, rolling her whole body into the motion of walking; getting started was a great effort. “Good music. From what I remember.”

* * *

“We’re reviewing your position in SOE,” Lestrade said. “But you’re officially no longer under investigation.”

Joan closed her eyes. “Thank you,” she said after a moment, quite calmly, looking once more at Lestrade.

“Don’t speak too soon. You’re not going to be court-martialled, but there are plenty of people who want to see you typing up requisition forms for the rest of the war, if not discreetly discharged altogether.”

“I know.”

“Just as long as you’re not feeling too optimistic.”

“No fear.” Joan hesitated. “So you—know what he did.”

Lestrade grimaced. “The evidence,” he said, “is clear, as far as we can tell. From the testimonies offered.”

Joan knew whose testimony that must mean, and allowed a dangerous, frail hope to spark in her chest like a match struck in the dark. She swallowed, tried to look natural. “And—Holmes?”

Lestrade raised his eyebrows, looked weary and faintly, pleasantly bemused, as he often did when Sherlock was mentioned. “She’s definitely out. She’ll receive her discharge papers any day now.”

“No court-martial.”

“No.”

“So she provided the information which proved Harding was a traitor. You believe what she said. She explained it all, about Corentin, and the landing spots, and Moriarty.”

“Can’t divulge details of the internal investigation,” Lestrade said, slowly and judiciously, “but I can’t stop you theorising.”

“And is she—alright?” Now that Sherlock was finally not a taboo subject, Joan’s voice held a frantic eagerness. Lestrade looked at her with some surprise and Joan realised she had never been so enthused in front of him.

“Yes,” he said. “Moaned about her wrist for weeks, and her toes for longer—they were broken. She limps except when she gets bored of it, put it that way.”

“Was her nose broken?”

“No. Badly bruised.”

“Thought so. Good. Good, that’s really good. And—how is she? Otherwise.” Lestrade hesitated, and Joan’s heart sank. “Oh,” she said.

“Doing well under the circumstances,” Lestrade said.

“No she’s not,” said Joan, and Lestrade sighed, dismissed her.

* * *

The records came back in three days’ time, delivered by Ensign Mull who complimented Joan’s musical taste while looking discreetly dumbfounded at the idea that the hard, sandy woman in front of her, who wore her BD all the time even though she was an officer and didn’t have any manual work to do, could ever have an appreciation for jazz. Joan thanked her and dismissed her. There was a pleasure in being able to tell people to leave and have them do it, she found; something she would miss when she was inevitably stripped of rank and quite possibly discharged entirely. She predicted it would be on medical grounds, all rushed through, much made of her old leg injury and doctors trained to know what to say giving prepared speeches. She might still be eligible for a pension. What a thing to look forward to at twenty seven, really.

Mrs Hudson had a record player, an ancient thing which weighed enough to make Joan groan as she hauled it up the stairs, while Mrs Hudson herself wrung her hands and called to her to be careful. Mrs Hudson hadn’t been sure whether it even still worked. In fact, it didn’t. This pleased Joan enormously. She spent the afternoon with fixing the wiring, thinking of nothing, and when finally Maxine Sullivan started to sing, in her murmuring liquid way, about how _you’d be so easy to love_ , Joan sighed and smiled, sitting back on the floor, her shoulders against the side of her armchair and her face upturned to the ceiling. She stayed like that until the song ended. The record now hissing impotently, she returned her gaze to it and pursed her lips.

She stood, took the record off the turntable and put it back in its sleeve. Then she walked downstairs to the telephone, rang F Section headquarters and asked to be patched through to Lestrade’s office. The call would be listened to. That was all very well. She wanted this to be above board.

“Watson? What is it?”

“Hello, Major. Sorry to bother you, but I wanted to confirm I’m free to move without being escorted.”

“Yes, yes,” Lestrade sighed, in that resigned way of his. “Got better things to do than waste resources.”

“Good. Thank you, sir. One other thing—is Holmes free to do the same?”

Lestrade hesitated for a few moments. His tone, when he spoke, wasn’t unkind. “She’s at her sister’s flat, Watson. I think that’s what you want to know?”

Joan swallowed. “Yes sir,” she said. “Thank you sir.” And she hung up.

She checked her watch. It was only quarter past ten in the morning. That wouldn’t do. Later. Later. She went back to the flat and put on Maxine Sullivan again. You’d be so easy to love.

* * *

In the new, clear light of evening and of freedom, Joan had the time to be impressed by the location of Mycroft’s flat. The building was elegant, moderately sized, privately wealthy and unfussily dignified. She suspected, somehow, that no one else lived there, despite Mycroft only occupying a few rooms; or perhaps it was inhabited by one of Mycroft’s tasteful female employees. She thought about Mycroft in her suit, and wondered—but didn’t wonder. Didn’t have the energy. Let Mycroft keep her secrets. Joan wasn’t there for her.

She hadn’t called ahead. How could she have done? She didn’t think Mycroft would be in the phone book.

When she stopped a few steps from the door she realised she was terribly, painfully nervous, almost nervous enough to cry, almost nervous enough to shake, almost nervous enough to turn around and run. Her palms were damp and her skin was prickling. Her collar felt too tight. Her clothes felt absurd. Her head and neck ached and she felt strangely light, nauseously light, giddy but helplessly stuck in her own bizarre body.

She stepped back once—but no, no, that was stupid. So she steeled herself and took two agonising steps towards the door and raised her hand, but before she could knock there she was: Sherlock, wrenching open the door, looking as terrible as Joan felt. Joan stared at her soundlessly. She was wearing only a dressing gown, gold silk, though the shoulders were badly stained with something brownish and streaking; Joan guessed it was hair dye. It swamped her and sagged loose about her frame, made her look even more skeletal than usual. Her skinny ankles were visible under the hem, and her long, bony feet. She was pale and feverish-looking, with red eyes and high spots of colour on her cheeks but nowhere else, and her hair was scraped back into a damp bun.

“Yes,” Sherlock said. “Yes, whatever you’ve come to ask.”

“What?”

“Oscillation on the pavement. Always very, ah—telling.”

“Yeah?” Joan tried.

Sherlock nodded, just a quiver. Her face had thinned out so alarmingly that her eyes looked enormous.

“You alright?”

Sherlock frowned, muttered, “Yes, of course,” and then they fell silent. 

Joan couldn’t believe it. After everything: silence. She saw Sherlock’s look of reigned-in panic, and knew she should go through with her plan after all. Even though she had expected Sherlock to be dressed. Even though she had expected Sherlock to be angry, for some reason, or expected to find herself angry with Sherlock, or—something. Something more violent; something easier than this mutual terror.

Joan swallowed hard, and said, “I was wondering.”

Sherlock blinked, looked questioning. “What?” she said, in that oddly irritable way of hers she had when she didn’t understand something.

“Wasn’t finished. I was wondering,” Joan stopped, cleared her throat, “I was wondering if you wanted to have dinner.”

Sherlock just looked at her. The silence dragged more words out of Joan’s mouth. “I mean, ideally, I would take you to a restaurant. Or you would take me to a restaurant but—I’ve got better taste in food than you. I mean, I’ve got—a taste in food, as opposed to a sort of. Disdain for it. I’d take you to a restaurant, and we’d talk, and eat, and drink wine, I suppose. Not good wine, probably, but enough bad wine to get drunk on. And then—we’d go dancing. Maybe. Or on a walk somewhere. I don’t know. I don’t know what you like yet. I know you—very well, but not in—in real life. Yet.”

Sherlock stared, saying nothing. Joan carried on wildly. “But of course that’s a bit difficult. So I was thinking—dinner at mine, at 221B. And then that walk, if it’s not too late, or even if it is. Or that dancing. Because I’ve got some records, I, my brother, he—found some of my old records from France.”

Sherlock was still staring. Joan swallowed, bore up, changed tactics. “Although to be quite honest,” she said with a kind of manic cheer, “you look absolutely rubbish and like you really need to be in bed—”

“No,” Sherlock said. “No, no, I don’t. Stay there. I’m going to change.”

She slammed the door on Joan’s face. It took Joan a moment to start laughing, but when she did, she howled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Oh goodness, we're racing towards the end. The next chapter will be the final chapter, and I hope it will be wonderful for you. Once again, it will be posted within the next three weeks, hopefully. (Sorry; I've got exams and work and all sorts of fuss to be getting on with). Now; notes!
> 
>  **"MIs 9 and 19"** \- MI5 is home security, while MI6 is foreign intelligence, but MI9 and MI19 are less well-known. MI9 only existed during WW2 and was tasked with aiding resistance fighters in occupied territories (though as far as I can tell, unlike SOE, they never sent agents over). MI19 was responsible for the interrogation of enemy prisoners of war.
> 
>  **"a house in south London"** \- Latchmere House, or [Camp 020](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_020). There's a mention there of Tin Eye, who was Lieutenant Colonel Robin 'Tin Eye' Stephens; supposedly he even slept in his monocle.
> 
>  **"Records?"** \- Hee. [No Man's Mamma](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIezhGnyBLY); [Jazz A La Carte](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z17UC_hkUJ0); [Easy to Love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLK8RQOiooc).


	29. Holmes & Watson.

Sherlock had snapped and snarled like a muzzled dog all the way through her detention and interrogation, even when the interrogation had turned into more of a questioning, then a discussion, then an argument; even when they had started relaxing the rules slightly, when they had brought her out of the detention centre and put her up in a monitored safe flat in Kensington. She had felt that to back down—to smile or laugh or politely accept a single offer of a smoke, or some coffee, or a telephone call to Joan Watson—would damage her argument. The only thing to do had been to keep repeating the evidence, talking of nothing else, barely sleeping, barely eating. Not thinking, just talking. Never thinking. Pouring out data like so much ticker tape. 

_Thank God that’s over_ , Sherlock thought, waking up once more in France. At night, the most verminous parts of her mind woke up and scuttled about beneath the floorboards of her sleeping brain. Bad dreams punctured her rest. Sometimes in her nightmares she ended up in Germany but at other times she was in London, and for all the wrong reasons. But now the morning cut swathes of pale light across the room and Sherlock’s breathing began to slow as she became steadily more certain that yes: yes, this time, she was really awake.

There were things she liked about France, and waking up to light, real light, was one of them—when she woke up in the morning, that was, when she wasn’t doing night work. Today, though, it stung her eyes. A dull, pulsing ache had started in the crown of her head and was spreading throughout her body. It was hot; her blankets were damp and sticking to her. She tried to remember just where she had lain down the previous night. All this skipping from bed to bed gave her a drifting feeling, as if she crossed miles even in her sleep and could never be sure she would wake up where she had put her head down. Today she was greeted by the hazy grey morning shapes of a bare _banlieue_ backroom, fading sleepily in and out of focus; fading down to black as she closed her eyes again.

“Sherlock,” said Mycroft, from the doorway.

She opened her eyes and what she had taken for a dim-lit Paris hideaway solidified into the spare room of her sister’s Pall Mall flat, black-out curtains already opened by an unknown hand.

Sherlock scrambled up to sit and crammed herself back against the headboard. Pain exploded in her chest and behind her eyes, black splotches spreading like spilt ink over her vision. Her lungs felt scratched and her throat hot and full. “ _Dieu_ ,” she spat, pressing the heel of her hand to her brow, “are you mad? Don’t use names—”

London. London again. Every time she woke here, she felt the shock of supposed safety like a sudden slip and fall. There was no need to be nameless here. She was home. Mycroft stood tight-faced and straight-backed in the doorway, dressed, as ever, for work.

“Go,” Sherlock said, and bowed over to rest her forehead against her bent knees, hands dropping to clutch at the sheets. The door clicked closed. She shuddered and curled into herself, hot with fever and shame.

* * *

The word _invalid_ sounded like crumpled silver paper and made Sherlock think of the muggy cough-syrup heat of a bedroom occupied too long.

She sat in the overstuffed armchair in Mycroft’s sitting room, staring at the stopped clock. In her peripheral vision, Mycroft moved, a smooth dark shape, busy but never hurried. She was putting the finishing touches on her work persona, fitting her feet into black court shoes and pulling on her coat. 

Invalid. A crinkled, crumpled word, with a sweaty, over-sweet pallor to it. Mycroft still moved, buttoning up her coat. Sherlock tried to concentrate on the still hands of the clock. Her fingers twitched on the arm of her chair.

“What did you say,” she said, after a few moments, blinking and looking at Mycroft.

“I said,” Mycroft replied, wrapping a scarf about her throat, “that I’m glad that to see you in such an awful state.”

“What?”

“I’m glad,” Mycroft said, pulling on her beautiful pre-war leather gloves. “Terribly glad. To see you like this.”

“What?”

“Because I had thought I would never see you again. And had something happened to you—” Mycroft tutted faintly, picked up a briefcase “—forgive my euphemisms, had you died, Sherlock, my heart would have broken.”

Outside, a taxi beeped, and Mycroft’s impassive expression wrinkled momentarily in annoyance. Her heels snapped against the wooden floor as she walked past Sherlock. When she opened the door, she let in a blast of the winter city, a sudden roar of distant traffic and cold air, the smell of smog and dirty frost. “Mycroft?” Sherlock said, craning her neck to catch sight of Mycroft through the hall door, standing silhouetted against the white outside. The door closed.

“What do you mean?” she asked her sister’s absence.

Slowly, her fingers curled on the arms of her chair, until her hands were balled into fists, her fingernails digging into her palms. Her brow was wrinkled. She rolled the words around her mouth. Her head felt like it was full of sawdust, her face hot and her eyes dry and painful. Into her thoughts, Joan Watson came, cracking her wrist back into place and saying, “I love you.”

How to think of Joan Watson? Sherlock didn’t know and it made her furious, and yet not thinking of her wasn’t an option. Sometimes thoughts of her came unbidden, sometimes Sherlock called them up intentionally, and sometimes it was deeper and more unconscious than either situation: Sherlock would just find she was living around an absence in the shape of Joan. She had molded to her and grown to her and without her, she was off-balance. “I’m glad we met,” Joan had said once, “in stupid circumstances or otherwise.” They had been soaking in a bath in France and Sherlock had been thinking _I’ve never wanted to be held in place before_. Now they were out of stupid circumstances, and Sherlock found herself with all this aching tenderness which she didn’t know what to do with when it wasn’t stretched tight over deathly fear. It tired her out.

* * *

Two days later, both Holmes sisters sitting in Mycroft’s sitting room, Sherlock kept her eyes on the newspaper in front of her to say, “I’ve never—wanted to break your heart.”

There was the tiniest awkwardness in the china clink as Mycroft settled her cup against her saucer. A crockery stutter. “Well, obviously,” she said.

“Mm. Perhaps I’ve acted like I do on occasion.”

“Never convincingly.”

Sherlock didn’t believe her, but didn’t say more. Instead she chanced a look over the top of the classifieds. Mycroft, looking a little paler than usual, took another sip of tea and scored a decisive-seeming line across her paperwork with her engraved silver fountain pen. She was struck by the strange peace of the picture; Mycroft elegant and smooth-moving at her corner desk with her tea and her papers, and herself a messier dark splotch on the delicate pale properness of the room, her feet up beside her on the setee, her fingers ink-smudged from the newspaper. She felt on the edge of saying something or knowing something. Before she could say it or know it, there came the slow rumble of a motor stopping outside, the muted clap of a car door, a woman’s voice and a man’s voice unintelligible.

She and Mycroft looked to each other.

“That’s,” Mycroft said, and Sherlock replied, “No it’s not.”

“Yes, it is. Go.”

Sherlock stood up and hurried to the window with her breath caged in her throat, hand trembling as she tweaked the lace curtains. She stared. She put her hand to her mouth and left the curtain alone, stepping away from the window so as not to be seen.

Mycroft said nothing.

Sherlock stumbled towards the front door, groping her way through the hallway as if struck blind. Her heart was rattling the bars of her ribcage, and strange: that deathly fear was still there, though the only danger was rejection, was making some move towards Joan and not being met (she was thinking, still, as if they were sparring again, in Inverness, Sherlock striking out and Joan catching her wrist, fighting and balancing—)

She flung open the door. Joan stood there with her shoulders back and her face drawn, caught redhanded. Sherlock stared hard at her. And Joan raised her chin and met her gaze, expression taut with nervous, defiant want.

“Yes,” Sherlock said. “Yes, whatever you’ve come to ask.”

* * *

“Can you chop vegetables?” Joan asked. Sherlock raised her eyebrows.

“Of course I can.”

“Let me rephrase: done it before?”

“I’ve peeled potatoes.”

“Shit, of course. I’d forgotten that time you got put on jankers in Inverness.”

“Mm. And I saw you shooting.”

Joan looked up with some surprise. “Did you?”

They were standing in the kitchen of 221B Baker Street. Joan was slicing pork kidneys; Sherlock watched out of anatomical interest, supporting herself against the counter so as not to waver or wobble. Fever heat still clouded her mind and crumpled her brow. When Joan stilled her work, Sherlock met her eyes and shrugged. “Yes. You were more interesting than potatoes.”

Joan laughed and Sherlock smiled faintly, pushing away from the counter to wander about the kitchen. Her fingers trailed along the edge of the table, and she peered through the doorway to the sitting room. It was shockingly bare. The only hints of Joan’s occupancy were a pack of cigarettes on the table, a stack of daily papers and her coat hanging by the door. And the gramaphone, awkwardly placed, newly dragged down from some attic or basement. There were a few records carefully set beside it, arranged with an almost nervous precision. “You haven’t really moved in,” Sherlock murmured.

Joan’s knife hit the chopping board. “No. Well. I don’t have much to move in, really.”

“I suppose not.”

“This is the nicest place I’ve ever lived in,” Joan said abruptly. Sherlock glanced over her shoulder with her mouth open, but Joan still had her back to her, and was transferring the sliced meat to a pot of water. Sherlock closed her lips and looked again at the sitting room.

“It’s not unpleasant,” she said.

“Mm.”

Sherlock heard the click and flare of gas, and asked, “Why kidneys?”

“You’ve never eaten kidneys?”

“Once or twice.”

“Offal’s much easier to get than other cuts of meat. Always has been, actually, it’s cheaper, so I knew how to cook it long before rationing came in. Vegetables?”

“Mm.”

“Sherlock.”

“What?”

“ _Vegetables_.”

“Oh.”

It didn’t quite feel real, after everything: standing here in a perfectly ordinary London kitchen and talking about kidney stew. There were vegetables sitting washed and ready on the table. Sherlock tossed her hair away from her face, rinsed her hands under the tap—splashed cold water on her face, too, which still felt hot, a little swollen with fever. When she turned, Joan was studying her. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, just—I have a cold.”

“Try not to sneeze on the food, then.”

“I’ll do my level best.” She plucked a knife from the drawer and lowered herself slowly into a chair. “So. Kidney stew.” 

“Mm. I had to work hard to get the kidneys, you know.”

“They’re black market?” Sherlock asked, raising her eyebrows. Her surprise was practical, not moral; the meat didn’t look, to her, worthy of criminality.

“No, I mean I had to hide it from Mrs Hudson. She treats me like the man of the house.”

“Like you’re totally incompetent, you mean?”

“Exactly.”

Quietness settled in, and it made Sherlock nervous until she realised that it wasn’t surly, just preoccupied. The gentle thud of knife on chopping-board, the hiss of the stove, the bubble of the water; all these muttering sounds broke it up, softened it, kept it from being true silence. Joan joined her chopping vegetables. Sherlock couldn’t feel bored because, although it was boring, it was so unrealistic that each move of her hand, each diced potato, each chopped carrot, felt like it might disturb the whole picture. The feeling persisted through dinner; they ate it quietly, talked sparingly, smiled at each other. Kidney, Sherlock discovered—she had been lying about having eaten it before—wasn’t bad.

Still, she couldn’t eat all of it, and the quiet couldn’t last forever. She was swallowing a lot, over and over, swallowing nothing but air, her knife and fork tight in her fingers as she surveyed her half-empty plate. “Sherlock,” Joan said. She was fool enough to look up and meet Joan’s eyes.

After everything, Joan’s eyes.

“You scared me,” said Joan.

Sherlock’s hands trembled on the silverware so she put it down. Hid her traitorous fingers under the table. “I had to.”

“You could have told me more. We could have worked it out together.”

“I didn’t,” Sherlock swallowed, “exactly know how. I didn’t—I thought it—was the better thing to do. Spare you.”

Joan’s stare was fierce. “Don’t ever try to spare me again,” she said. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth, her eyes dark, and Sherlock knew her own stare was cold and piercing because she had trained herself to stare that way when she felt raw and open to attack.

“Do I still scare you?” Sherlock asked.

“No,” said Joan. “It’s never been you. It’s always been what you might do to yourself. You’ve only scared me when I thought you’d finally gone and done it.”

“I’ve ruined my life before, Joan. Don’t underestimate me. I’ll do it again.”

“Oh, shut up,” Joan said. “Shut up. So have I. It’s not just you, you know, who fucks things up. You’re not doomed to ruin everything you—”

“Shut up!”

“ _What_ —”

“No, be quiet, seriously, there’s—”

There was a brisk rap at the door, followed immediately by the sound of it opening and, “Yoohoo, Lieutenant—oh, I was just coming to ask if you were hungry!” cried a woman whom Sherlock assumed was Mrs Hudson, inviting herself in and crossing to the kitchen doorway. She was a blue-floral woman, quick and sharp in her sixties with fine-spun, pale permed hair puffed about her head. The word _landlady_ was not so much scrawled across her face as neatly printed in the sort of typeface used in advertisements. “I didn’t know you were having company, excuse me—”

“No, no,” Joan said, slowly loosening her jaw and putting down her silverware carefully. “No, it’s fine, this is—”

“Victoria Fox,” said Sherlock, standing and offering a hand.

“Sherlock Holmes,” said Joan at the same time.

Sherlock stood frozen with her well-trained sharp little polite smile crimping her mouth, her hand wavering in midair. Mrs Hudson fixed her with a hard, startled look, puffing up like a robin, and said, “ _Well_. Martha Hudson.”

“How do you do,” said Sherlock.

“Very well, thank you,” said Mrs Hudson, taking her offered hand and drawing herself up. Something about how she hardened her expression into one of unassailable dignity made a thin flicker of respect and instinctive liking kindle somewhere in Sherlock, though she kept her face expressionless. “Very well indeed. And I’m glad you’re...feeling better. Miss Holmes.” 

“Please,” said Sherlock, looking briefly and searchingly at Joan, “call me Sherlock.”

“Yes. Well! I’m glad you’re both sorted. I’ll leave you two alone now.”

“There’s more than enough stew to go around, Mrs H,” Joan said, “if you want—”

“No, dear, I have leftovers of my own for my tea, but thank you—pleasure to meet you, Miss Holmes—” And she was gone, smoothing her housedress, picking her way delicately across the bare floor like a spindle-legged waterbird, leaving the air a little flustered and disturbed. She closed the door and it was a few moments before Sherlock turned her head to meet Joan’s eyes.

“I like her,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Joan, looking away, fiddling with her fork. “She’s a good sort.”

“Why did you tell her my name?”

“Why did you give her an alias?”

Sherlock licked her lips. “The story attached to the name Sherlock Holmes isn’t exactly easy to explain,” she replied.

“Sherlock,” Joan said, looking up at her. “When have you ever worried about being easy to explain?”

Sherlock opened her mouth to reply and only succeeded in giving a little strangled laugh, looking away and swallowing hard. Her throat was aching. “Mm,” she said eventually, slowly returning to her seat. “Yes. Well, she seems. Exactly the kind of landlady you want, really. As they go. As a breed.”

“She’s not the landlady,” Joan said. “She doesn’t own this place anymore.”

“Oh...of course, SOE.” Sherlock paused. “They bought it from her?”

“Mm. For tuppence, but they let her stay here, which was what she wanted. After her friend died.” Joan shot Sherlock a level look, and with a start Sherlock realised that she was a part, now, of Joan’s semi-renounced world of delicate hints and double meaning. She didn’t know how to feel about it. “Now she’s a sort of housekeeper.”

“Her friend…?”

“Yes.”

Sherlock tried to look at Joan but she was again intent on shuffling cutlery. Slowly, she got to her feet again and left the kitchen, coming to stand before the record player and Joan’s paltry collection, crouching down to inspect their covers. They were tattered with age and bad storage, but still vivid. “They’re from before the war,” she said aloud. “Paris.”

She could hear Joan getting up, coming to stand in the empty doorframe between kitchen and sitting room. “Yeah,” she replied, voice quiet.

“I, uh.” Sherlock stood from her crouch, heart beating fast. She shoved her hands in her pockets, rounded her shoulders away from Joan and kept her eyes trained on the dog-eared glamour of the records. “I’m not good at it, you understand. This sort of thing. This—dinner, dancing—”

“Neither am I.”

Sherlock squeezed her eyes together, feeling how they itched and stung, how behind them a dull fever-ache throbbed. She dropped her head down, still facing away from Joan. “Then why,” she said, voice raspy and exasperated, “why in God’s name, did you invite me to—”

“I don’t know,” Joan said, “I don’t—know what to do to get you back, Sherlock. I’m just—doing all I can think of.”

Sherlock cracked her stinging eyelids open, stared with angry incomprehension at the records before her, rehearsing Joan’s words in her head. Her lips trembled, almost moved to mouth out _what to do_ in a silent echo. Her lashes beat a tattoo upon her cheek. She turned.

“You don’t have to get me back,” she said, real confusion in her voice. “I’m _here_.”

Joan’s expression faltered. “What?” she said.

They slept side by side that night, finally buried in the sheets of a double bed. Both too tired for sex, Sherlock hooked her foot about Joan’s ankle, and Joan laid her hand on the jut of Sherlock’s hip. In the black-out dark, their breathing was loud and familiar.

Some time in the night Sherlock woke and turned, pushing dregs of dreams away to re-entangle herself with Joan, who lay on her side, knees bent up to her body and shoulders huddled. Sherlock curled herself around her, pressing her stomach to her spine, and skimmed the tip of her nose across Joan’s shoulder. “ ’m awake,” Joan croaked.

“ I know. You meant a signal,” Sherlock muttered, settling back against her.

“What?”

“You meant, um,” she was fever hot, head-achey and dream-beleagered, “dinner and dancing were just a—a series of pre-agreed actions which transmit a pre-agreed message. Like—carrying your handbag on the left arm to warn a, um, a contact that approach is unsafe.”

“Not the message I was trying to transmit,” Joan mumbled into the sleep-hot pillow they shared, hand running down Sherlock’s arm and slotting their fingers together, squeezing.

* * *

After breakfast the next day, Joan packed a still-coughing but slightly more alert Sherlock into a taxi and went back inside with a smile clinging stupidly to her mouth. When she stepped into the living room of 221B, she looked around. Sherlock had been right. It looked bare—not quite as if uninhabited, but as if inhabited by someone who didn’t know how to fill it, which was unambiguously worse.

But there was really nothing to be done about that, and she would inevitably be turfed out sooner rather than later. So Joan rubbed the back of her neck and walked to the kitchen to fill the sink and deal with the debris of last night’s dinner and the morning’s breakfast. It took her a long time just to scrape the plates and empty the tea-dregs down the drain. She kept finding herself smiling at nothing, doing nothing, watching the January wind rattle the leafless crosshatch of branches outside, listening to the harsh and homely scream of pipes as she turned on the taps.

When the phone rang, Joan started. She hurried to the living room and grabbed the receiver with soap-slick hands, white bubbles sliding down her wrist and dampening her shirtsleeve. “Joan Watson speaking,” she said, gathering the flex, surprised by the loud cheer in her own voice.

“Lestrade here, Watson.”

“Morning, sir.”

“I bloody hope not, Watson, it’s just gone two PM by my watch.”

“Yessir, sorry sir.”

“I need you in my office noon on Thursday,” said Lestrade, and Joan felt something in her chest puncture. “Watson?”

“Yessir.”

“You’ll be there?”

“Yessir.”

“Good. That’s all. See you in six days.”

“Yessir. Thank you, sir.”

Joan hung up and stared at the phone where it sat, froggy and ugly, soap-scum now sliding greasily down the black Bakelite receiver. There was a thundering in her ears. She didn’t know why she felt shocked; if anything, they had been slow to discharge her. The fingers of her left hand flexed compulsively by her side, as if lost with nothing to grab onto.

She turned her head distractedly, suddenly thinking that perhaps that thundering noise was no mere headrush. “Shit,” she said, and hurried back into the kitchen, where both taps were still running and the water was rising up and over, cascading over the front of the counter, splashing and rattling on the floor like a kitchen-sink monsoon; “ _Shit_ ,” she snarled again, wrenching the taps off, then slamming her hands hard against the soaked edge of the counter, “Fucking—fucking—stupid—bastard— _thing_ —”

Exhausted by bad luck and good luck and the terrible risks and ecstasies involved in simply trying to live, she hauled in a garbled breath, bowed her head, and with great noisy sobs wept for the first time since the night she had come back from France.

* * *

Nearly a week passed. January, the old crocodile, dragged a mucky tail behind it and looked set to take up more of the year than it was entitled to. London was frost and mud and concrete: streets became snow-melt rivers, dun dirty brown. Joan bought a dark blue scarf and some other warm clothes, so that she had more choice between her BD and the few civvies still in her possession, preparing for a life outside of uniform. In a second-hand shop she lingered nervously over the tie racks. Her wages for the time she had spent in France had come in. Having her own money again felt like too much freedom.

She finished up her shopping without buying a tie. It wasn’t a lost opportunity, she thought with a kind of wonder, stepping onto the omnibus. She could go back to the shop if she wanted to. She had time.

Time. It seemed to hang slack at the moment. Six days ago she had had dinner, and breakfast, with Sherlock Holmes. Since then she had missed a call from her, and phoned back on the number she’d left with Mrs Hudson only to get Mycroft Holmes’ cool, clipped drawl telling her that her sister was much better, yes, but currently out, was there a message? No? Then good afternoon, Lieutenant.

Joan was sure she had used the title pointedly, but was also so exhausted by paranoia that she almost wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt.

But Mycroft surely _knew_. It wasn’t just six days since she had seen Sherlock, that wasn’t what made today important. It was Thursday, half past eleven in the morning, thirty minutes before she would be told she was officially out of the armed forces and the secret world.

Lips sealed tight together in a downwards-skewing line, she approached 221B, recalling that today, too, was probably the day on which she would be told how long she had until she had to find her own place—

Joan’s hand hadn’t touched the door when it opened, and Sherlock said, “Go up and get dressed,” marching past her and out onto the steps in a bustling flurry of WAAF blue. “I’m already late.”

“Jesus Christ!” Joan said, attracting the stares of a group of FANYs clustered together on the other side of the road.

Sherlock, restored to her greatcoat, her grey stockings, her regulation-length skirt, her tunic, her scuffed flat shoes, her cap—turned. Smiled like wildfire. “Mrs Hudson was good enough to let me in. What do you think? One last blaze,” she explained, spreading her hands at her sides in a magician’s _tada_ gesture, “of perfectly uniformed glory.”

Joan couldn’t help but laugh—just once, a happy bark of pleased amazement. She could feel her eyes crumpling and her cheeks aching. Back in uniform, Sherlock looked wonderfully anachronistic. The shock of seeing her was still sweetly painful. “You’re meeting Lestrade too?” she asked. She had forgotten how good it felt to be so nonplussed by Sherlock’s extraordinary way of navigating normality.

“Yes. I was due in his office five minutes ago.”

“So you’re here—why?”

“Because I’m not going without you,” Sherlock said, and Joan stared at her with the vestiges of her shocked grin—then raced back down the steps to reach her. She saw Sherlock start, as if expecting an embrace, perhaps conscious of the FANYs still drifting along the pavement opposite. But Joan just pulled her scarf from around her own neck and wrapped it about Sherlock’s. Sherlock’s eyes widened.

“I don’t like seeing you in perfect uniform,” Joan told her, and as she pulled the scarf tight and loosed Sherlock’s curls from it, she let her hand brush against the muffled swell of Sherlock’s breast. “Gives me the creeps.” She had forgotten, too, how good it felt to see Sherlock so startled. Grinning, she ran up into the house, up the stairs, to pull on her own still-new still-stiff officer’s issue. When she returned, Sherlock was still on the pavement with her back to the house, cutting a silhouette with a vengeance. Joan couldn’t help but stop and admire.

Sherlock turned, coat fanning out behind her. She was still wearing Joan’s scarf, though she had retied it. Meeting Joan’s eye, she snapped off a perfect salute. “Lieutenant.”

With the knowledge of what was about to happen, the rank stung Joan’s heart, but she swallowed, and found that to her pride and nervous optimism, the pain wasn’t unbearable. “Assistant Section Officer,” she said, saluting just as flawlessly, her shoulders back. “Come on. Let’s face the music.”

They hadn’t given Lestrade Harding’s old office. Surprising good taste, Joan thought, for SOE. Still, the brass plate on the door read F/DD. F Section, Deputy Director. There was no time in war for too much sensitivity. It was, however, propped open, as Harding’s never had been, and Lestrade yelled, “Bring ‘em in!” before the armed Lieutenant who had been escorting them through the bowels of the Baker Street HQ could knock.

Joan and Sherlock looked at each other. It didn’t escape Joan that Lestrade was expecting them together, despite having apparently scheduled separate meetings. Their escort held the door for them.

“I was hoping you’d both come to the first appointment, not the second,” Lestrade said, kicking back behind his desk and nodding at the soldier lingering on the threshold, who closed the door—fully, this time. “Take a seat.”

“If you were expecting us to come together,” Joan said, sitting on Sherlock’s right, “why not just schedule us together? Sir.”

Lestrade squinted. “Got to at least look like the protocol’s being followed, Watson. And because you like having something to rebel against.”

“That’s,” _not the case_ , Joan tried to say, but the words failed in her mouth. She shifted in her seat and glanced at Sherlock, who was smirking faintly at her own lap. “Just her. Sir.”

“Is it?” Lestrade asked.

“Major,” Sherlock said, looking up, “shall we?”

Lestrade reached for the mug on his desk and took a swallow. “Yeah,” he said, and that gripping pain closed about Joan’s heart again. She looked to Sherlock, breathed slow, and reminded herself that she would survive it. “Let’s. Holmes, you’re first.”

Distantly, Joan decided she would have to say something to Sherlock about this afterwards. Like—thank you. Thank you for doing this with me. Her gratitude was raw now, tangled with fear and guilt, but once this was done it would retreat cravenly and leave her once more gruff and uncomfortable expressing how glad she was not to be alone in here, with good and well-meaning Lestrade, and her imminent dismissal, and the vestiges of Harding’s treachery.

Lestrade was holding out a piece of paper. Sherlock took it and examined it. Joan’s mouth felt very dry. “Your discharge certificate. Medical grounds. Excessive dependence upon medication which makes it inadvisable for you to operate machinery or be involved in signalling to aircraft.”

“And I wasn’t transferred to an admin post because…?” Sherlock said, casting her eyes over the paper.

“Because you’ve got no typing experience, Holmes. _Miss_ Holmes. It’s not unusual,” Lestrade added. “And I’m sorry about the cause they’ve put down there. I tried to get them to go for something less specific, but no dice. Still, very standard stuff. It’s pretty common for returning agents to be quietly discharged. It’s the stress. But we can’t put that on official reports when official reports show no record of front-line service.”

Joan blinked. She hadn’t really thought of it in those terms. _Front line service_. Lestrade was still looking at Sherlock and Sherlock was still looking at the discharge certificate. “Still,” Lestrade said, and Sherlock looked up. “You might like to know that you’re a divisive subject.”

“I already knew that.”

“Half the people in SOE want you hanged.” Lestrade raised his eyebrows. “The other half want you to work for them.”

“Which side do you take?” Sherlock asked.

Lestrade said, “That’s irrelevant.”

Sherlock looked at him with thoughtfully Arctic eyes. After a long moment, Lestrade said, “This acceptable, Miss Holmes?”

“Mm,” said Sherlock.

Lestrade hesitated like he was expecting more, but more didn’t come. He transferred his gaze to Joan, and Joan thought _just get it over with_. Her mouth was dry, her heart thudding dully away under her layers of drab khaki. Sherlock was folding away her certificate. “Watson,” Lestrade said. “As for you.” He wasn’t reaching for any papers on his desk. “A number of senior SOE personnel, female personnel, have mentioned the lack of specialised training for female agents. And more widely, the issue of having few instructors with experience in Occupied territory has become apparent.”

Joan’s face didn’t move, save for a tightening in her jaw. “Sir,” she said, not daring to understand.

“Plus Moran’s death has resulted in the need for new hands in the training schools. He practically ran them himself, which—” With a sigh, Lestrade admitted, voice arid, tight with a sudden anger, “Which was, in retrospect, _slightly too much power_. We have a vacancy. To start with you’ll be stationed in Wanborough providing basic firearms and physical training, as well as potentially travelling to Beaulieu to discuss life in Occupied France with trainee agents preparing to—”

“So I’m a civilian, Major?” Sherlock inquired, using her most glassily refined voice. It shattered Joan’s shock and she swallowed hard, feeling the conversation escape from her completely. 

She had the strangest feeling she had just been offered a job. While Lestrade blinked and looked back to Sherlock, Joan reached up, pushing a lock of growing-out hair away from her face.

“Yes,” he said.

“So I’m no longer obligated to show military respect and obedience?”

Lestrade raised his eyebrows. “No,” he said. “We’re all expecting an enormous change.”

Sherlock waved a hand, and then placed her folded discharge certificate on Lestrade’s desk—along with her elbows. She brought her hands together and put them against her mouth for a moment. Then she pulled them away to say, “Good. Then I’m in a position to negotiate.”

“ _What_?” Lestrade said.

Joan kept watching. Her mouth was open and she was having trouble following exactly what was being discussed. But Sherlock seemed to have come almost violently alive. She tossed her head as she leant back in her chair and shrugged in a liquid movement—and Joan suddenly felt a white flame of love, that impossible hope, lick up the inside of her ribcage, singe her throat, make her swallow.

“I have an offer of employment,” Sherlock said, “at Bletchley Park. They made it a while ago, but I’ve been given to understand it’s always open.”

“After _this_?”

“After what? After I sorted out a security leak which would have otherwise gone unnoticed and done untold damage? I’ve been cleared of all charges and I haven’t lost my ability to think. They won’t pass me up. And I won’t pass them up.” Lestrade opened his mouth, but Sherlock held up a hand. “ _Unless you make me a better offer_.”

Lestrade’s eyes were fixed on Sherlock, and Joan was glad for it, because she felt that if he were to glance over at her he would see, immediately, everything that she felt, all her disbelieving wonder. All her incredulity over Sherlock hurt her, like stretching a long atrophied muscle, nerves lighting up as sensation prickled back in.

Across the desk, barely noticed by Joan, whose attention was all on Sherlock’s profile, Lestrade made a noise of exasperated diplomacy and spread his hands. “Even if we wanted to,” he said, “that would be impossible. We can’t compete with Bletchley for funding. We can’t pay you their rates.”

“I don’t want money,” Sherlock said. “I want flexibility.”

“Miss Holmes—”

But Sherlock had an expression like a starved-down dog snapping for a kill, and Joan thought, _yes! Yes!_ “I’ll consult for you independently but exclusively, paid on a case-by-case basis. It will be economical for you. I’ll advise on, examine and investigate any problem or issue which may arise. I would advise that you start by having me assess the security of your coding. I can present my findings and recommendations within two weeks. Should be fine as long as you give me access to the information I need. Oh, and speaking of which, that ought to work nicely for you. I leave it entirely in your hands what data you give me.” Sherlock’s mouth curved in a sharp smile. “It would simply be in your best interests to be both truthful and thorough.”

Lestrade was staring at her. The look in his eyes had faded, with impressive speed, from shock to calculation. “Impossible,” he said, though his expression didn’t agree.

Joan was sure she wasn’t breathing. Sherlock shrugged. “You can keep my involvement quiet.”

Lestrade was grinding his jaw, now meeting Sherlock’s stare and matching her for hard intensity. “This place is too cloak and dagger as it is.”

“It’s also insecure. Major,” Sherlock said, leaning forwards. “Do you think Moriarty was the last? Do you think Harding was the last? And do you think that the trouble they caused has been smoothed over now, in a matter of weeks?”

Lestrade looked uncomfortable, his mouth slanted—but his eyes were clear and serious. “Course I don’t,” he said.

Sherlock leant back in her seat without saying a word.

“I’ll have to think,” Lestrade said.

“I’m not finished,” said Sherlock. “You’ll sell 221B back to Martha Hudson at the price you paid her for it in the first place. At most.”

Lestrade looked almost relieved to have something to deny out of hand. He leant back, face shifting to an expression of almost impressed amazement. “My God, you’ve got some nerve. I can’t do that.”

“I’m happy to subsidise it if you’re uncomfortable with the monetary aspect. Six month’s free consultancy.”

“We need the safe flat.”

“You have other safe flats. _Me_ ,” Sherlock said, and showed her teeth, “I’m the only one of me in the world.”

“A year’s free consultancy,” Lestrade said, with surprising swiftness.

“Fine,” Sherlock said, while Joan blurted out, “Nine months.” Both Lestrade and Sherlock looked at her with surprise, as if they had forgotten she was there. Joan couldn’t blame them. She had been frozen; she still felt numb with shock, but she had recovered, at least, the power of speech

She sniffed, wet her lips, and tried to stare coolly at both of them. “Nine months is a fair compromise.”

Sherlock was blinking at her, a slightly startled look on her face. But she turned back to Lestrade. “A year,” she said, more firmly. “A year’s free consultancy.”

“Sherlock—”

“I’ll manage, Joan,” Sherlock murmured.

“This isn’t agreed,” Lestrade said. “I can’t sanction this on my own. And I won’t have any more operations within operations. This has to be _legal_.”

At this, Sherlock growled out her breath, a flash of terrible frustration twisting her face. “You know very well it will never get past Sir Carlisle,” she said, and for the first time her voice betrayed desperation.

“Not all of us,” Lestrade said, “are completely incapable of diplomacy.”

Sherlock stared at him, her teeth still together. _Now_ , Joan thought. _Now’s when you stop raising the stakes. You’ve done enough, Sherlock._

She was more amazed than relieved when Sherlock slowly let out her breath and leant back. “Make some phone calls, then,” she said. “Be _charming_.”

Joan breathed out too, coming back to herself, dizzy and bewildered. Lestrade looked from Joan to Sherlock and from Sherlock to Joan. “I’ll be in touch,” he said.

“Sir,” Joan said.

“Yes?”

“Did you—am I still in SOE?” she asked weakly. “You’re still employing me?”

Lestrade grinned. “You? Course. I never wanted to give you up, Watson.”

Somehow, they made it out of the building, down onto the street. Joan was clutching at the sleeve of Sherlock’s greatcoat. “Let’s,” Sherlock said, and at the same time Joan said, “I think we should—” “221B?” “Yeah, yeah, come on—”

They stumbled along the street like one quadruped beast, staggering into each other as if drunk and just managing to cross the road before a car clipped Sherlock’s coattails. At the steps to the door of 221B, Sherlock suddenly stopped, and Joan turned.

She had taken off her cap and was shaking out her dark mane, baring her teeth at the blank white page of the sky. Breathtaking. Joan couldn’t speak for a moment.

“Thank God,” Sherlock said. “Thank God that’s over.” 

And though Joan could have said, _it’s not, the war’s still going on, you’re still involved in this_ —she knew what Sherlock meant, and it wasn’t the time to challenge her. Sherlock looked wild but she also looked shaken, her cheeks flushed with high spots of colour, her up-turned eyes closed half in rapture and half as if to hold tears in check. _Thank God that’s over_ : a half-life of dampening herself down. 

Perhaps it was love which made Joan for a moment unguarded against foolishness. Whatever it was, she only smiled faintly as Sherlock slowly lowered her chin and looked from the dark blue WAAF cap in her hand to Joan, and then looked over her shoulder, at where at double-decker bus was trundling up Baker Street, red as a Bolshevik and advertising war bonds on its flank.

It was then that Joan realised what she was about to do. “Sherlock,” she said, but it was too late; Sherlock had thrown the cap as if it were a discus, sending it sailing jaggedly through the air, a blur of blue, to be crushed beneath a wheel. The bus clattered on.

“You bloody fool,” Joan said. “That was good material you just wasted.”

Sherlock turned and flashed the ferocious nicotine grin which even now made Joan’s words stick in her throat. “Let it be wasted,” she declared, hurrying up the steps to join her. “We’ve got the whole rest of the war to scrimp and save.”

Joan opened her mouth, then shook her head and unlocked the door without speaking, opening it by ramming it with her shoulder, grabbing Sherlock’s lapel even as she did it—and as she slammed the door she crushed Sherlock’s back up against it and caught her mouth with hers, kissing her cold lips with a clumsy, fumbling, wondering fervour. When, gasping, they separated, Sherlock said, “ _Mrs Hudson_ ,” and Joan said, “So get a move on and _come up with me_ , if you’re so worried—”

And what did a cap’s worth of blue serge matter?

They careened up the stairs, tripping over each other’s feet, their hands fast in each other’s clothing or grabbing at the bannister and the walls to keep themselves steady, the world tipping and tumbling like a keeling ship. The door slammed open. They fell in and this time it was Joan who was pushed against it, Sherlock’s fingers scrabbling at the belt of her tunic and Joan’s hands in Sherlock’s hair. Joan kissed her hard enough to bruise both their mouths, scraping at her lower lip with her teeth, and when they broke apart she found herself lightheaded.

“You madwoman,” she gasped, and felt Sherlock’s breath tremble in her chest, shudder through them both.

“So was that,” Sherlock said, “was that a good thing to do?”

“Throw your cap into the road?”

“Before that. In the office.”

“Yes. Yes, Sherlock, that was amazing.”

Sherlock laughed, a little too high-pitched, and when Joan pulled back she saw that Sherlock looked confused and pleased and young, a marblish glow of pink brightening her cheeks. “What?” Joan asked.

“Nothing,” Sherlock said. “Really?”

“Really what?”

“Really amazing?”

“Really,” Joan said. “Really amazing.”

Sherlock dropped her forehead down against Joan’s and said, “I would _so_ like to be out of this damn uniform.”

Joan said, “Please, yes,” and shoved Sherlock’s coat off her shoulders, pulled off the scarf, unbuttoned and unbelted her tunic, scrambling for skin. They stumbled away from the door together, scattering WAAF blue serge in their wake, until Joan was untucking Sherlock’s shirt and sliding it off her shoulders. She paused. “Perfect uniform my arse,” she snapped, glaring up at Sherlock and then grinning as her fingertips skimmed along the wide, satiny peach band of Sherlock’s non-regulation brassiere. 

It had to be black market, or else extraordinarily well-preserved from before the war; the underbust sheath of satin reached to the top of Sherlock’s ribcage, and the cups were decorated with pointless pleats. Defiantly ornamental, Joan thought, her other hand tracing down from the jut of Sherlock’s clavicles to the warm, pink-mottled plane of her sternum, to the little lifted V of the brassiere’s center gore. It didn’t sit quite flush to Sherlock’s bony chest. Joan hooked her thumb in the hot little space between satin and skin and looked up again.

Sherlock huffed and rolled her eyes, sullen and lovely and smirkingly, coyly vicious, though her cheeks were stained pink, her pupils blown wide. “Apologies, Lieutenant,” she said, her voice hoarse and smoke-burred. Joan licked her lips.

“You know this has to come off,” she said, and her voice cracked a little as she pressed her thumb harder against that central V, just between Sherlock’s breasts.

“Yes ma’am.”

“Right now.”

“ _Yes_ , ma’am.”

So Joan grabbed her and spun her, shoving her up against the back of the sofa and pressing up close to her, hands so casually hard on Sherlock’s body that Sherlock grabbed at the cushions and gasped, “Don’t rip it—”

Joan put her chin on Sherlock’s shoulder, fingertips digging into her sides. “What happened to scrimping another day?” she asked, grinning, kissing Sherlock’s throat, but nonetheless she was gentle as she unhooked the undergarment and slid its straps from Sherlock’s jutting shoulders, revelling in the idiosyncrasies of her body. She was a jumble of angles and long planes, half boyish in her tall lankiness but with those sharp, wideset, weaponish hipbones nonetheless stretching the fabric of her drab skirt.

That skirt. Something about the aggressive lack of eroticism and promise in that navy serge skirt made it positively obscene. Joan seized Sherlock by the hips. “I’ll never recover,” she grumbled into the top vertebrae of Sherlock’s spine, and Sherlock’s chuckle rumbled through them both before she bent forwards from the waist, putting her forearms on the back of the sofa, revealing the milky expanse of her back. There was a scattering of dark freckles over her shoulderblades; her spine was prominent as a dorsal ridge. Joan’s breath escaped her lungs. She had meant to make a joke about the weird sensuality of utilitarian drabness, of the skirt, of the flat shoes, but what came out of her mouth was, “Fuck, Sherlock, I’m never going to bloody recover from you, am I.”

Sherlock craned her neck to look over her shoulder. Her hair had fallen into her eyes. “Do you want to?”

“Of course I don’t want to,” Joan said, and with that unbuttoned Sherlock’s skirt. It fell in a tumble of navy to her feet, revealing grey stockings, a black suspender belt, blue knickers, a hotch-potch of regulation and black market loot. Joan grabbed the curve of her backside hard, once ( _fuck_ she had forgotten how Sherlock hissed like that, how she sometimes sounded angry during sex, a wild and snapping spitfire) and then sank to her knees to bite at her thighs and unhook her stockings, to wrap her hands about her ankles—thin, bone-spiked, tendons taut as wires—and lift her feet, shedding her shoes, slipping stockings off her toes. “ _Ah_ ,” Sherlock said, the prelude to a giggle as Joan’s fingers brushed a ticklish spot on her sole. Joan grinned and kissed up goose-pimpled-razor-stubbled calves, behind her knees, where she found skin chafed by winter stockings, sensitive to her tongue. Above her, Sherlock kept up a litany of small growls and gasps, and Joan felt every shift and quiver of lean, greyhound muscle; every shudder as she lifted up onto her tiptoes and back down again, the wincing gasp she gave as Joan’s fingers quested up to the damp, hot fabric between her legs.

In a rippling swan-movement Sherlock unbent herself, leaning backwards to grab Joan’s hair hard. Joan swore. “Bed,” Sherlock snapped. “And I think the amount of clothing you’ve got on is appalling.” She let go. Joan breathed hard. She would have happily stayed kneeling down, testing each inch of Sherlock’s skin to see the resultant reaction. Something in her longed to try to re-catalogue her, with all the pleasure of knowing it was a neverending task. Her own body was less interesting.

“Get _up_ here,” Sherlock said, interrupting Joan’s brief hesitation. Joan stood. Sherlock had turned to face her. “I want to see you,” she said, and her face was drawn with urgency as much as with fierceness. The violence of her emotion had made her vulnerable.

Joan kissed her hard, and let her lead her to the upstairs bedroom.

The low winter sun coming in from the window soaked everything orange. The room was very cold. They didn’t speak, but their breathing moved the silence. It took a long time to excavate Joan’s body from the layers of her officer’s dress uniform, and it caused more of that strange welcome pain which Joan had felt sitting in Lestrade’s office, being astonished by Sherlock all over again. The sting and ache of coming back to life. 

Her bare back hit the bed and Sherlock, in just her flimsy blue knickers, hovered above her on all fours. Joan dragged her down by the hair to press their mouths together. Both their lips were rough and chapped with cold and kissing, and Joan felt, already, the dry-lipped vinegar-sting of _too much_ , knew her mouth would be raw tomorrow, but wouldn’t stop. Sherlock wasn’t crouched above her anymore but was flush with her, their breasts flattened together, Sherlock’s knee against the inside of Joan’s. And everywhere Sherlock touched, Joan felt herself remembering her own skin.

She rolled, pressing Sherlock down onto the mattress and hooking her fingers into the fabric of her knickers, just at her hip, pulled too viciously— “Now who’s wasteful!” Sherlock crowed giddily as the cotton split at the seam, kicking her legs to free herself from the scraps and laughing. Joan took advantage of her raised legs to grab one foot, bend her knee back up towards her, and lean in to fasten her mouth against her cunt. Sherlock’s raw, edge-of-her-breath laughter stuttered into a moan. Joan dragged her tongue in long, wide licks, still gripping Sherlock’s foot, thumb against her hooked, high arch. She could feel how she flexed and how her toes curled. She tasted salt-hot and rockpool sweet.

“ _Joan_.”

When Joan raised her head, she saw that Sherlock’s eyes were fixed on her. The hand not tight in Joan’s hair was at her mouth, not quite hiding a grin. Her eyes were crinkled and bright. Joan licked her lips slowly and Sherlock laughed, throwing her head back onto the mattress so that it shook, so that springs creaked. “Obscene,” she said, voice rumbling.

“Says the woman with her legs spread,” Joan murmured into the crease of her hip, then flicking her tongue against thin, ticklish skin. Sherlock leapt, gasping, body jacknifing and her foot escaping Joan’s grip—next thing, Joan felt her heel digging into the small of her back while she lowered her mouth again to the dark split plum of Sherlock’s cunt. Her hips trembled up and up and up, and inbetween her hisses and growls she made sounds like faint, fluttering sobs. Joan sucked and licked with a fervour which was so selfishly vicarious that when Sherlock started pressing herself skittishly and needily to Joan’s mouth, when her noises became choked and breathless in a long, hard climax, Joan moaned as if she, too, felt it.

She rose, flipped Sherlock over, and didn’t stop. She gave two hard smacks just to see how Sherlock’s skin blushed red and how she kicked at the mattress and dug her nails into the pillows. Then, two fingers hooked inside her, Joan lay on her side, arm out so that with a brief lift of her chin Sherlock could shift and turn to face her and be pillowed against Joan’s shoulder. Joan fucked her slowly. Their breath mingled hot and Joan’s mouth was still full of Sherlock’s salt. Sherlock kissed her with an obscene care, as if trying to lick out the taste of herself with all the enjoyment of a gourmand. Every time she pulled away Joan saw her swollen-lipped and greedy, and despite the sweat beading on her forehead, despite her little gasps and groans, there was a bright intensity to her eyes which Joan knew was the wild thrill of control. And Joan knew she would do whatever Sherlock wanted her to do.

Sherlock bore down on Joan’s fingers, one of her hands snaking down to grab Joan’s wrist, coax her further in. She had closed her eyes, her lashes dark half-moons on her cheeks; beautiful, beautiful, Joan thought wildly, feeling frozen in time, pushing and pushing and pushing. And as Sherlock’s hips stuttered and snapped forwards, as she held her breath, Joan thought she would come again—but instead she let out an exhale in one huge, swooping, smoky breath, opened her eyes, and suddenly wrestled Joan over, pinned her down, kissed her. Joan’s fingers slid free. They grappled sweat-slick and come-slick; and winter sun aside—Joan thought—gasping breathlessly—laughing—it could have been August in Inverness. But why should it have to be? It could be January in London—it didn’t have to be the past—surely?

It was no first time, either, she thought, almost shattered with delight at that stupid and obvious realisation. They were both stumbling in and out of each other’s rhythms, kissing old remembered spots on the other’s body. Sherlock was rocking against her, trying to settle her hips so that their cunts could press together, and for a few moments Joan pushed up against her for the sake of the movement, the rolling give-and-take, but then laughed and grabbed Sherlock’s wrists to bring her tumbling forwards. “That never worked for me,” she admitted.

“Really?” Sherlock asked with slightly breathless interest, splaying her fingers and not fighting Joan’s grip on her wrists. “I liked it when you did it to me.”

“I know you did.”

“Though—” A moment of alarm made Sherlock’s eyes widen. “I assume you didn’t mind—”

“Loved it,” Joan said, lifting her chin to catch Sherlock’s lips a moment. “You, squirming under me? Course I bloody loved it. Doesn’t matter that I wasn’t technically, uh…”

Sherlock laughed at her loss of words and Joan nipped at her ear, let go of her wrists to push her fingers through the thick mass of Sherlock’s hair. “You,” Joan felt herself saying, “you are, God, amazing.”

“I know,” Sherlock replied, and began to suckle at Joan’s thudding pulse point. With a low, almost purring sigh, Joan tipped her head back and let Sherlock work her way down her body. 

In France—sleeping on attic floors, or running gun in hand from set charges, or fucking Sherlock hard and silent in the cramped confines of banlieu backrooms—her body had been so intensely _her_ , the agent of her survival and her downfall. Here in London it had become once more something to wear uniform over. And now Sherlock was here to bring her back to the surface of her skin, seal her inside her bones, force some hard connection between the Joan Watson who thought of herself as _Joan Watson_ , so sensible and so serious, and the Joan Watson who was a crack shot and who slept with women and whose stomach muscles now tightened as Sherlock mouthed so wetly at her pebble-hard nipples— “God,” she breathed as Sherlock mapped out with her fingers how her ribcage split open beneath her sternum: “God,” with a kind of shock, as she realised that the past few weeks hadn’t been enough to burn sensation out of her. She laughed, she gasped, she finally groaned as Sherlock sealed her mouth between her legs and began to suck.

She wasn’t going to come. She could tell that from the rhythm and the timbre of the sensation which juddered through her. It didn’t matter. She pushed and dropped her hips, riding Sherlock’s tongue, tensing and then relaxing as she heaved in huge ragged breaths. Sherlock had lifted her thighs atop her shoulders, and her hands reached up along Joan’s sides, nails digging in harder whenever Joan lifted up and shoved against Sherlock’s mouth: it was a lose-yourself rhythm, slow and deep, shaking Joan to the core. Gathering her breath, she propped herself up on trembling elbows to better see how Sherlock lapped at her. Sherlock felt her shift, and had the temerity to look up. Wide pale eyes flashed above the blonde thatch between Joan’s legs. As Sherlock lifted her head, Joan saw how a clear strand of moisture stretched between her lower lip and Joan’s cunt.

“Oh my God.” The bedsprings creaked and bounced again as Joan’s head slammed back against the mattress. “Get up here right now.” Sherlock chuckled, and dragged her tongue over Joan’s clit once more—“Sherlock!”—before she clambered up Joan’s body to drop atop her again, like some huge and lazy cat, nibbling at her neck. Joan could smell sex on her breath from there. “Mmm, _stop_ your—’m not your bloody chewtoy—”

“My my, I wasn’t aware of that caveat.”

“Bollocks to your Latin tripe,” Joan said, near-hysterical, heart thumping gloriously hard in her chest.

“Bollocks to your class nonsense,” Sherlock announced, framing Joan’s face with her forearms and frowning down at her. “And bollocks to you pretending to be so blockheaded.”

“Pretending,” Joan said. “I’m so glad you think I’m pretending.”

Sherlock tsked and Joan caught her mouth to shut her up: they kissed slow and shallow, tracing each other’s lips with tongues, swapping salt-spit until their tastes mingled. Joan locked her arms about Sherlock’s waist and they rolled onto their sides, now licking into each other’s mouths, kissing like teenagers just alerted to the possibilities of sex. They hooked their legs together. Joan pressed her heel to the back of Sherlock’s knee, squeezed her tight, kissed her deeper.

Finally, Joan said, “I missed you. Hell, I missed you.”

“Yes,” Sherlock said, and Joan was almost painfully relieved by how Sherlock, just this once, didn’t start or seem alarmed by Joan’s admission. She answered readily, her voice determinedly frank: “Yes, I missed you too. Terribly.”

Joan kissed her again, rolled her onto her back, and began to thumb at her clit, her fingers moving confidently now over Sherlock’s skin. Her other hand wrapped about one of Sherlock’s wrists, pushing it into the pillow above her head. Her memory and Sherlock’s body quivered in echo of each other: Sherlock’s hips shuddered up, her toes curled in the sheets, her hand cupped Joan’s face, and with each stuttered movement came recognition, as Joan thought yes, _yes, yes, this feels right_. 

“We haven’t ruined _everything_ ,” she remarked in a strained deadpan, kissing Sherlock’s damp palm with a casual gentleness as her fingers worked between Sherlock’s legs, rubbing in hard circles. Sherlock, startled, laughed loud and outrageous, and then cried out, her body snapping up from the bed. Joan chanted, “Yes, God, that’s it,” all through Sherlock’s second orgasm. When her breathing slowed she covered Sherlock’s body with her own.

It was exhausting to think, and worse to feel, so Joan clung to Sherlock and tried to make herself be nothing but a body for as long as she could. She breathed in the scent at the crook of Sherlock’s long white neck, where her pulse visibly jumped and slowed, and she breathed out to the rhythm of Sherlock’s fingers on her scalp. With Sherlock’s other hand on her hip, Joan was startled by how very compact she felt. _I always think I’m taller than I am. I always know I’m not._

The room was no longer cold. Saturated with sticky heat, she kissed Sherlock’s chin and peeled herself off her, dropping onto her back on the bed. Her eyes were closed. When she opened them again, Sherlock was making her way down her body, her hair falling across Joan’s stomach as she flicked her tongue at her navel. Joan grinned, pushed her fingers through Sherlock’s curls, and the silence stretched out, became fragile, battered-at by the distant grumble of traffic and Joan’s quiet low noises as Sherlock kissed lower and lower. Joan tipped her head back, pressed her shoulderblades into the mattress. Her hands were clasped in Sherlock’s, palm to palm and fingers interlocked. Sherlock’s tongue was soft and slippery and quick. Joan’s breath rattled in her chest. A wing-beat gasping rhythm. Sherlock was noisier though her mouth was at Joan’s cunt. She whimpered right into her and made deliciously vile noises of effort as she tongued her, and when Joan came it was in a sudden short wave of hot confusion, a hard and unexpected shudder in her hips and belly, a pulse of warmth: fuck, _fuck_ and over, leaving her panting so hard that her lungs ached.

“Okay,” she said, after she had calmed. “Okay.” Sherlock had slumped onto the pillow with her. They locked eyes. Joan didn’t know which of them was the first to start giggling.

One room in a city of rooms. A beehive metropolis containing countless cells in which people shouted and smiled and spied and fucked and washed dishes and weathered the war. Joan rolled over onto her side and clasped Sherlock to her. This room would do. She dozed; she dreamt of waking.

* * *

Perhaps half an hour later, perhaps longer, Sherlock stirred and in doing so roused Joan from her half-sleep. By the time Joan had sat up and rubbed her eyes, Sherlock was already sliding from the bed, stretching and then bending to search for her discarded clothes.

Joan said, “Are you leaving?” with some shock.

Sherlock, not looking away from the floor, said, “No. I was going to invite you out to dinner.”

“You’re hungry?”

“I’m ravenous,” Sherlock admitted, standing up with her underwear in hand and looking a little sheepish. Her mouth was hooked in a wry smile.

Joan laughed. “Okay,” she said. “Dinner. Put your knickers on first.”

Knickers on and more besides they took to the streets at a fast clip. Baker Street vanished swiftly behind them. Sherlock was dressed in her WAAF uniform for lack of having anything else handy, but already she moved differently, her limbs swinging more easily. Joan walked with her past trees plucked bare of leaves and bright posters advising them to look out in the black-out. Distantly, car horns beeped nonsense Morse messages. Wartime hours had artificially lengthened the evening sunlight, and the day hadn’t yet begun to curl at the edges.

Sherlock was talking about the potential relevance of perfume to criminal investigations.

Joan opened her mouth to ask when this had ever come in handy for her, and instead, almost accidentally, said, “Live with me.”

Sherlock’s lips parted, then closed. She stopped. She said, “Uhm.”

Joan laughed, though she had startled herself as well as Sherlock. “Right,” she said. “You can throw your cap into the road, and act like you’re impulsive and carefree, but when it comes down to it—”

“Don’t challenge me,” Sherlock said fiercely. “I’ll live with you.”

“Good,” Joan replied. She stood her ground, a few steps from Sherlock, and tried to understand what they had just agreed on. “Great. Holmes and Watson.”

“It sounds good,” Sherlock said, as if conceding a point. Joan nodded.

“It does sound good,” she agreed.

Sherlock took a few slow steps to catch up with her, and they began to walk again, finding a slower rhythm. “You’re sure?” she said.

“Who else is going to put up with either of us?” Joan pointed out.

“That’s true. That’s very true. And it sounds...yes. Holmes and Watson of 221B Baker Street.”

Joan looked up in some surprise. “What?”

“Mrs Hudson will want tenants,” Sherlock said. “Didn’t you think of that? And it’s the nicest place you’ve ever lived. Unless you’d prefer somewhere away from Baker Street, after everything.”

Joan licked her lips. “No,” she said. “Maybe. No, I don’t think so. I think I’d—yeah.” Her voice betrayed her own astonishment at herself. “I’d like to,” she said. “I’d like to live there with you.”

“Yes,” said Sherlock. “Well. Good. Good, I’m glad.”

“You don’t know if what you tried to pull back there in Lestrade’s office will work, though.”

“Of course it will.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Alright, I don’t know it, but it’s very probable.”

“Oh, good, yeah, because if I had to put a word to everything that’s happened in the past year, _probable_ would be—” Joan paused and looked about her. Sherlock’s meditations on parfumery had carried them far from Baker Street, and they were flanked now by unfamiliar blank-eyed buildings and one long trench of old rubble where a row of houses had been, years ago. “Do you know where we’re going?”

“Haven’t the faintest, actually,” Sherlock admitted. “You?”

“No idea.”

“Somewhere in the direction of dinner.”

“Yeah,” Joan said. “Sorry. You’re starving, aren’t you? Come on. We’ll find somewhere decent.”

They walked on past the debris, seeking out the places where the city, scarred and grown strange to itself, had nonetheless been left standing.

_FIN._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
> 
> And whole day's applause, please, for lbmisscharlie, without whom this would never have happened.
> 
> Thanks, also, to Sarah (girlwith1oneeye), whose comments always gave me something to look forward to after updating; I feel like now I should mention _everybody_ who encouraged me and delighted me with their reading, but there are just too many to thank. Know that I value you all so much. This is your girl coming good, albeit a little late.  <3
> 
> And just one note:
> 
>  **"lack of specialised training for female agents"** \- absolute ahistorical bollocks, my friends. I'm sure I've mentioned [Vera Atkins](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Atkins#Special_Operations_Executive) at some point? WELL. The reason she's not here is because I just couldn't handle her brilliance, basically.
> 
> Again: thanks. And, fuck! I hope it was good!


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